Social entrepreneurship education through service learning

Social entrepreneurship is an approach that combines entrepreneurship with social challenges of civil society. From an instructional point of view, social entrepreneurship education requires learning concepts geared towards technical and methodological skills, as well as social challenges. Service learning seems to fit these requirements, since curricular content is associated with civic engagement. The objective of this article is to examine in a theoretical and empirical way the potential of service learning for social entrepreneurship education at universities. To this end, the article presents the results of two pilot studies on the effects of service learning arrangements at German-speaking universities. The results show that when students are confronted with social challenges of non-profit organizations and work on them, they perceive a higher level of self-efficacy and they reflect about their self-image.

19.06.2015 | Karl-Heinz Gerholz (Paderborn) & Peter Slepcevic-Zach (Graz)