Title: Teaching ethnic minority entrepreneurship through parables

Authors: Edwina Pio; Leona Achtenhagen

Addresses: School of Business and Law, AUT University, 42 Wakefield Street, Private Bag 92006, Auckland, 1142, New Zealand ' Jönköping International Business School, P.O. Box 1026, SE-551 11 Jönköping, Sweden

Abstract: Ethnic minority entrepreneurship operates in increasingly complex and ambiguous environments. Thus there is the need for entrepreneurship educators to prepare students to handle ambiguity and to develop a more comprehensive, contextualised and individualised understanding of ethnic minority entrepreneurship. In this paper, we present parables as a pedagogical tool to facilitate an understanding of ethnic minority entrepreneurship through the embracing and tackling of ambiguity by students. This is done through student interviews conducted with immigrant entrepreneurs in Sweden, followed by the construction of parables based on the interviews. The liberatory type of pedagogy where the student is the storyteller highlights multiple layers of meaning, including power, hegemony and exploitation in the interpretation and teaching about ethnic minority entrepreneurship. Such parable pedagogy encourages entrepreneurship educators to give more emphasis to ethnic minority entrepreneurship in the content and design of their curriculum.

Keywords: ambiguity; parables; entrepreneurship education; ethnic minority entrepreneurs; Sweden; pedagogical tools; immigrant entrepreneurs; storytelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESB.2013.052056

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 2013 Vol.18 No.2, pp.154 - 172

Published online: 30 Sep 2013 *

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