Going Green in Entrepreneurship Education

<< Background >>All our partners have been engaged in entrepreneurship education for years teaching young people how to start and manage enterprises, create jobs for themselves and for other people. This all has been useful but during the last ten years we all have started to feel that environmental aspect has to be added to our curricula. Businesses have the greatest impact on environment using too much not recoverable resources, causing a huge amount of leftovers, often having poor waste management, commiting into climate change with transportation and other business gases, making people to consume too much as a result of excessive marketing, etc. We have tried to add elements of environmental thinking into our programs it but it has not been enough and we all have felt that the materials for teaching green entrepreneurship are missing. there are some theoretical materials, but often they are not interesting for young people and we have experiences also ourselves that learning by doing has more impact on changing attitudes. So we gathered to find and create active learning materials for making students understand the impact that they have on the world and for teaching them how to change their activities into environmentally sustainable ones.<< Objectives >>Our first objective was to create a teaching material for schools with active learning exercises, simulations, discussion materials and environmental business games so that learning will be more interesting for students and they could understand better the real problem and the possible ways for solving it. These materials were addressed to teachers who could implement them in classrooms for several years, and can also change themselves according to their students abilities, working tasks and changing world around us. The second objective was to create an on-lline self-assessment tool for learners to understand their impact and to analyse it themselves. Very oftenr students they that they are ecofriendly but they use only leftovers of companies or reuse materials when implementing their entrepreneurship lesson task. All other element were not taken into consideration at all. This assessment tool is meant for their learning process, not for teachers to put grades. It can be used several times during the learning process to see their own achievements in environmental business process.<< Implementation >>We had peer-to-peer teaching and learning sessions four times during the project period as we had planned. There all participants presented their already existing materials about teaching green entrepreneurship, we discussed them, made amendments and tested all the methods through. Between the training sessions participants made research work for finding new materials mostly from internet, adapted existing entrepreneurship learning activities adding the green focus to them and developed brand new ones which were presented to others during the next teaching and learning session. Based on these materials a handbook of more than hundred pages was written involving short theoretical overview of all topics and active learning exercises, games, discussion topics and simulations. This handbook is meant for teachers for using the materials when teaching these topics. The most important target group are teachers of entrepreneurship, but they can be used also in economics, geography, history, language lessons, etc.We also created an on-line self-assessment tool for students. for this we consulted several environmental specialists and IT specialist also for finding the most suitable user-friendly way. This was all tested with teachers in our countries and also all of it was tested in classrooms. Based on the feedback changes and amendments were made.<< Results >>1. A Teachers Guide for Going Green in entrepreneurship Education. - 109 pages, 32 different activities with all templates, guidelines, playing cards for teachers to print out and go to the classrooms.2. An on-line self-assessment tools for students for measuring their environmental footprint during their entrepreneurship exercises, student companies but also during other activities.