Search results

Civic engagement involves working to make a difference in one’s community. Experiential learning enhances civic knowledge and promotes the process of reflection that students can take beyond their educational experiences. The purpose of this paper is to identify whether civic engagement may be increased through domestic experiential learning experiences and to inform future educators about how a domestic immersion experience can be used to increase civic engagement among students.

Twenty-five students who participated in a domestic immersion experience in January 2022 were sampled. Reflection and changes in civic engagement were measured with student responses to questions before, during and after the immersion.

During the preimmersion, students showed a desire to learn about the Afghan refugee population and considered preimmersion anxiety mitigation strategies. Using the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Civic engagement VALUE rubric, the four main themes were diversity of communities and cultures, civic identity and commitment, civic communication and civic action and reflection. The main themes yielded post immersion were increased civic engagement and aptitude to apply knowledge and skills. The subcategories of continued civic engagement were career planning, volunteering and educating others.

The findings provide guidelines to future work in civic engagement. This case study provides insights into the impacts of domestic immersion experiences and how it allows the opportunity for experiential learning.

Driving economic development at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) is an enduring global challenge. While the market-based approach places hope on entrepreneurship as a major impetus to drive the underdeveloped economy, the performance of entrepreneurial businesses and their impact on poverty reduction are sometimes below expectations. This paper seeks to examine the factors that may be hindering entrepreneurship within the BOP context. This paper presents preliminary answers and provides research suggestions related to this question.

In order to identify the reasons behind the underperformance of entrepreneurship at the BOP, a comprehensive literature review was conducted to see what is already known about this puzzle.

By reviewing extant literature, four clusters of factors were found to shape entrepreneurial activities at BOP: (1) Individual-level factors may be restraining entrepreneurial activities within BOP context, (2) gender inequality at BOP is hindering female entrepreneurship, (3) insufficient institutional support is holding back entrepreneurial activities in BOP and (4) business development initiatives are making multi-faceted impacts on entrepreneurial activities in BOP.

This paper contributes to theory in that it is the first comprehensive review of literature on constraints of entrepreneurship in the context of BOP. In investigating influential factors of entrepreneurial success in the BOP context, the authors recognize four major influential forces that are shaping entrepreneurial processes at the bottom of the pyramid and further propose three directions of future research that are worthy for further exploration.

This paper adds to the ongoing debate on judgements, opportunity evaluation and founder identity theory and shows that founders vary in their prioritisation and combination of judgement criteria, linked to their respective social founder identity. It further reveals how this variation among founder identity types shapes their perception of distinct entrepreneurial opportunities and the forming of first-person opportunity beliefs.

This study uses a qualitative approach by presenting three business scenarios to a sample of 34 first-time founders. It adopts a first-person perspective on their cognitive processes during the evaluation of entrepreneurial opportunities using verbal protocol and content analysis techniques.

The theorised model highlights the use of similar categories of judgement criteria by individual founders during opportunity evaluation that followed two distinct stages, namely search and validation. Yet, founders individualised their judgement process through the prioritisation of different judgement criteria.

The authors provide new insights into how individuals individuate entrepreneurial opportunities through the choice of different judgement criteria that enable them to develop opportunity confidence during opportunity evaluation. The study also shows that first-time founders depict variations in their cognitive frames that are based on their social identity types as they assess opportunity-related information and elicit variations in reciprocal relationships emerging between emotion and cognition. Exposing these subjective cognitive evaluative processes provides theoretical and practical implications that are discussed as well.

Government primary schools in Australia increasingly take up the International Baccalaureate's Primary Years Programme (IB-PYP) to supplement government-mandated curriculum and governance expectations. The purpose of this paper is to explore how teachers navigate and contest dual policy-practice expectations in the Victorian Government IB-PYP context.

This study used a narrative inquiry approach. The narratives of two teachers were generated through a narrative interview and then re-storied with participants through a set of conceptual lenses drawn out of the policy assemblage and affect studies theoretical spaces.

The stories participants told show that competing mandatory local policy expressions are experienced and contested both to stabilize a technocratic rationality and produce alternative critical-political educational futures.

There a few accounts of teachers' policy experience in government school settings implementing the IB-PYP. In addressing this gap, this paper directly responds to prior claims of the IB's failure to promote an emancipatory pedagogy, showing instead that when teachers who bring a more critical understanding of educational purpose to their work take up the IB-PYP policy to support the enactment of that purpose.