Promoting early entrepreneurship education in Vietnam : insights of education entrepreneurs

Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate early entrepreneurship education in Vietnam by exploring education entrepreneurs’ perceptions on how to incorporate entrepreneurship education into primary schools. Entrepreneurship education is considered a form of education that seeks to provide learners with entrepreneurship-related knowledge, skills, qualities, and personal characteristics. Accordingly, three main research questions concerned, (1) what aspects participants recognize to be considered when entrepreneurship is incorporated into education at primary schools in Vietnam? (2) what skills and qualities need to be fostered to develop children’s entrepreneurial mindset? (3) what elements in a learning environment can support early entrepreneurship education in Vietnam? In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted for five education entrepreneurs via Zoom. The data consisted of five transcripts translated from Vietnamese into English for coding. Thematic analysis was applied to analyze the data. The results showed that the education entrepreneurs had different points of view on both the concept of entrepreneurship education and appropriate student’s age as well as benefits and challenges for implementing entrepreneurship education into schools through various entrepreneurial activities. Furthermore, six significant skills and seven entrepreneurial qualities that need to be fostered to develop children’s entrepreneurial mindset were recognized in the analysis. Finally, an ideal learning environment to support early entrepreneurship education was proposed in learning design and changes in teacher’s role. The findings of this study have implications for proposing understandings of how entrepreneurship education could be incorporated in Vietnam’s primary schools. The insights from the education entrepreneurs along with their influence in both the educational and economic field would be a bridge to encourage changes regarding the education system in Vietnam, where early entrepreneurship education remains a neglected idea that has yet to receive an official introduction from the Ministry of Education.