Positioning through epistemic cognition in higher education: conceptualising the ways in which academics in a business school view heutagogy

Teaching and learning in higher education is informed by a multitude of conditioning factors, not least the values systems and outlook of academics. Understanding the epistemological positioning taken by academics in relation to teaching and learning is therefore important if we are to make judgments about how we educate now, and could do so in the future. Developments in educational theory and digital technology have opened-up new possibilities for the ways in which students learn, and to a degree this has been accelerated by the responses from universities to the COVID-19 pandemic. How then should we conceive the future? Heutagogy is one of a number of theoretical approaches that has attracted interest from those who wish to see greater student control over the learning journey- but how widespread is this view amongst academics? This paper reports on a qualitative study in which 12 academics in an English Business School were asked to describe their views on teaching and learning, which we can encapsulate through the concept of epistemic cognition. The findings infer that there is little epistemological underpinning for heutagogy and that if academics are going to innovate, then additional resource and professional development should be put in place to support epistemic reflexivity, and a shift in their epistemological positioning. The paper conceptualises academics' positioning through a typology of epistemic views.

Entrepreneurial decision-making in a microcosm

This study investigates when, how and why students use opportunity management behaviours (causation, effectuation and bricolage) within a fundraising project that acted as a microcosm of the entrepreneur’s world. Such a pedagogical device reveals students’ use of different opportunity management behaviours over the different stages of entrepreneurship. Although research has confirmed the use of these behaviours by entrepreneurs, how student entrepreneurs learn, and practice, them, remains underexplored. Causation is the predominant focus for university teaching, yet our data reveal that students adopted all three behaviours at different stages of the fundraising project as they responded to different contextual forces. Our findings suggest that opportunity management theories should take a more prominent role in the higher education entrepreneurship curriculum. Educators also need to provide a better means of facilitating students to learn about, and practice, a greater repertoire of opportunity management behaviours than is currently the case.

Critical event recognition: An extended view of reflective learning

This inductive case study extends existing reflective learning theory by introducing the concept of critical event recognition. We define this as the cognitive process through which individuals conclude that they are facing a critical learning point that demands a change of thoughts and actions. Extant theory has described reflection and learning as processes of interaction among an individual’s various experiences and has emphasized that critical events are important for these processes. Yet, theory has largely ignored how learners develop task-specific cognitions from such critical events when they lack previous task-specific experiences to which they can relate the reflection. This study proposes an extended perspective on reflective learning by shedding light on event recognition and by illustrating how cognitive development may progress when the individual has little prior experience with which to integrate the reflection from critical events.