Quasipractice: How the entrepreneurship educator develops entrepreneurial practice expertise

Abstract

There is a growing interest in exploring the practice-based foundations of entrepreneurship education. Despite significant advancement in scholarship regarding entrepreneurship education, our understanding of the ‘educator’, especially how they develop and sustain their abilities to enable learning in practice-based entrepreneurship education, remains sorely understudied. In contrast to existing cognitive learning approaches, we suggest practice-based knowing as an alternative pathway to develop entrepreneurial practice expertise. We build on Heidegger's existential ontology and use the ideas of entwinement and breakdown to build—quasipractice—a process of developing entrepreneurial practice expertise through proximal engagement in the actions, emotions, and cognitive experiences of an entrepreneur, including the experience of temporary breakdowns, and reflection on the breakdowns experienced. Quasipractice helps advance the literature on both the professional development of the entrepreneurship educator and the larger area of practice-based entrepreneurship education.