Lived Experiences of Educational Entrepreneurs: Exploring Qualities and their Realities

Abstract

There is a new breed of teacher who uses their skills and abilities to build and develop programs, services, and products that improve the teaching and learning process. This spawned a new type of entrepreneurship known as educational entrepreneurship, edupreneurship or teacherpreneurship. Edupreneur in the study is as a member of a school organization who engages in outside entrepreneurial activities that is relevant to education, teaching, or learning. Using the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the researcher conducted interviews and confirmed them through narrative reflection, field notes, and theoretical memos to five participants. The method triangulation was used to ensure validity and achieved data saturation which helped in the interpretation of the essence of the participants’ lived experiences using the Seven-Steps of IPA Data Analysis (Smith, 2009). Based on the experiences of the participants, they exemplify and are characterized as being hands-on which means doing everything and understanding what is going on in their businesses. Being hardworking or putting much effort and keep trying to succeed both in the area of teaching and business. They also exhibited flexibility or the ability to adapt to changes may it be in their teaching career or their business and on how and when things and jobs have to be done. They are empowering as they invest in relationship with people, trusting, valuing, supporting, and communicating with them. Empowering others will lead to people wanting to work and help in achieving the goals of the business. The participants constantly learn and grow as evinced on their additional studies, training, and from their learned experiences and lessons in life. Being creative, innovative, resourceful, problem solvers, positive, and visionaries and who know themselves and their capabilities were also common characteristics of the participants who thrive and beat the odds of their two roles as edupreneurs.