Entrepreneurship Education –

Regional Ecosystems and Social Inclusion of Disadvantaged Groups

28th of September 2023 – PH Freiburg

As part of the EU-funded project SIATE (Social Inclusion of Adults Through Entrepreneurship), the Department of Economics and its Didactics at the PH Freiburg, together with the Entrepreneurship Education Working Group of the German Society for Economic Education, is organising a conference on the topic of Entrepreneurship Education – Regional Ecosystems and Social Inclusion of Disadvantaged Groups.

Entrepreneurship education, which can be understood both generally as the promotion of entrepreneurship and specifically as the empowerment to start a new business, however, hardly takes into account how disadvantaged groups can be socially integrated and what challenges they face when they want to become entrepreneurs. Most strategies, measures and projects in the field of entrepreneurship education focus on the highly qualified and overlook the disadvantaged groups and their circumstances and rationale to become entrepreneurial. Although policies and framework conditions have improved, especially for refugees and migrants, many other groups, such as young people without perspectives and school drop-outs (NEETs and ESLs), are hardly taken into account in the current policies, as analyses within the framework of SIATE show.

The European perspective also shows that the structure of approaches differs greatly from country to country. One strong influencing factor here is the welfare state model in each country. In Germany, the heterogeneous landscape of adult education seems to lead to very different approaches at the local level.

Against this background, the conference will on the one hand serve to compare different local approaches in the field of entrepreneurship education in general and with regard to marginalised target groups in terms of their specificity and possible generalisability; on the other hand, it will deal with methodological-didactic approaches that deal with the specific promotion of marginalised groups, as well as possible inclusive effects.

Our conference will therefore deal with the following topics:

1. local/regional entrepreneurship education ‘ecosystems’.

We welcome contributions that deal with the history, structure and/or carriers of individual local/regional entrepreneurship education ‘ecosystems’ (or why the stories are always short), as well as comparative contributions that look at several local/regional entrepreneurship education ‘ecosystems’.

2. Integration-oriented approaches to entrepreneurship education.

Contributions are particularly welcome that deal theoretically or practically, abstractly or case-specifically with the question of how marginalised groups can be – efficiently? – supported through entrepreneurship – especially with regard to their social integration. Furthermore, it is interesting to consider why integration-oriented approaches often lag behind offers for the highly qualified.

As international participants will also be present via the EU project SIATE, the conference will be held bilingually in German and English.

Individual parts, such as panel discussions, will be held in hybrid form.

Participation in the conference is free of charge.

GENERAL INFORMATION

Venue: University of Education Freiburg

When: 28th of  September 2023

Abstracts: open in February

Registration: soon to come