How do we grow creativity value in classroom
topics
and relate it to entrepreneurship?
By Dian Sulistyo
at National Educators Conference, 11-12 Des 2012
Sampoerna School of Education, Jakarta
Abstract
In one nation, ideally percentage of entrepreneurs is
at least around 2% of the population. Compared to Indonesia, with 237 million
people, what is the number do we have? It’s just about 1.56% percents.
Students who have graduated from their schools or
colleges mostly think that their life will continue to work for a big
corporation, bank, government or another well-known institution or business
center. Have they thought of how those big and well-known corporations
established? Went through a phase of up and down-situation in economic cycle
which impacting their existence?
Somehow, entrepreneurship is very closely related to
the creating and developing creative ideas. In future, it is expected that the
students can make the ideas come to real products or services that they can
contribute to society. Now, we as educators provide this value to our students
while they spend their time in our classes/education sphere with us? During
this time, let’s provide creativity minds and environment through classroom
topics. Accordingly, we encourage and lead them to create their future life
goals creatively, full with alternatives and choices. I believe it will set
them to be individuals with no-single reference in the term of choosing career
or doing business.
This paper wishes to revitalize the old ideas and
practices to be new, fresh, attractive, stimulating for the teachers, educators
and students to reshape the current target of learning process as to build
characters of creative people who would have more choices to work and be
enriched with self-independency towards their career in future.
Key words: creativity, entrepreneurship,
edupreneurship, education, topics.
Introduction
In 1900s, Indonesian education institutions are
introduced by the concept of “Link and Match” that the schools or campuses
should have provided graduates linked with employment or industry. It means
that the graduates directly had to be ready to work in any industrial
environment or for any business scales. On the other hand, corporates or those
organizations should have given training to their new employees before they
started to work, though. Seemingly, study at school/campus was not enough to
generate graduates who were ready for work.
Now, this viewpoint has shifted to the point that
school and campus not only create graduates ready for work, to be employee/labor,
but also create graduates who are ready to employ, create business or work, can
contribute more values and redounding to bigger scale of community. So, the
population of job seekers would decrease along with the raise of more graduates
can create their own jobs, more entrepreneurs around. To wonder, is this that
easy to produce graduates with the soul of entrepreneurship, having own
business? Or, should this enforce them to be a business owner? Or, should we as
teachers, educators, to build their character that ready for any circumstances?
It means they can work as successful employee, or can self-work or even have
their own business? I think, to have entrepreneurship in their minds and
actions is not about one short time learning, but it should have started from
as early as possible since they learn in their life
. They
can learn from schools and from the environment.
Do we need these values of being creative,
innovative, independence and relevant risk-taking to be taught in classrooms,
even in non business school classrooms? The answer is WHY NOT? The teachers
also will benefit from their students whose living with these criteria.
Not only from the inner circle, that is family,
school or classroom learning would also be the right place for them to
cultivate their potential. In school, they learn more systematically how to be
creative, identify opportunity and solve problem faced in their life, always
look for alternatives and varied responses to any questions raised around them.
How do we expect that later, after they graduate or after years of experiencing
employment, our students can create their own business, manage their workers
and calculate any risk to be taken, while when they are still in school/campus,
they have no chance to cultivate these potential values? Or, although they
later work in certain corporations or other institutions, don’t they undeniably
want to develop better career in future? So even if
they end up in a corporate job, they want to get promoted, or they want to
become management, like an executive or a CEO someday, having that
entrepreneurial mindset, then
they can
actually focus on what they’re doing and treat the business like their own.
That's only going to make their career that much better.
As a result, It’s expected that they can obtain the
highest achievement during their employment and in any career they will have
chosen.
Entrepreneurship
Value
Entrepreneurship
holds most important values such as innovative, creative, independent and
relevant risk-taking. While entrepreneurship is associated mostly with business
creation, in fact it reaches beyond that. Entrepreneurship mean goes further
than just forming a success enterprise, building a mountain of wealth, being
well known over the world wide, spreading prosperity to him/herself and others.
It values new ideas. Entrepreneurs are people with ideas
who seize an opportunity to generate value or well-being in
society by providing for unmet needs with a new product or service, or by
carrying out an existing activity in a novel or more efficient way. They look
for what is changing, what is needed and what is missing and then undertake the
task of achieving their vision..
For most students, it’s
expected that they would value this ‘ideas humankind’. These young people have
got to learn on developing their innovative skills and discovering new ideas,
not only in their classrooms but also from the environment and surrounding
facts or issues. This attitude would bring them to be more persistent, not
giving up and always be willing to spread positive values to others, such as
building cooperation, being helpful, constructive competitiveness, self
confidence, self-reliance and efficient (R. Jusoh). Contrasting to recent
situation that most education institutions nowadays encourage their students
later to be merely workers (in factory, company) or work for government (PNS). Apparently
they have been limited to choose an employment with fewer choices. At the same
time as in the work, employee is also demanded to be creative, innovative so
they can be beneficial to the company. If they hold entrepreneurship
values then they are supposed to be active, more contributing to the company
and well developed in their career or in their work, not only focusing to the
skill development, technology usage, business preparation and others, but
they have also to focus on changing mindset,
aptitude and attitude of entrepreneurship values.
Setting up
Education Linked to Entrepreneurship Values
When mentioning ‘setting up education’ term, it leads
to many more entries, such as educational issues, regulations, budget,
input-output, etc. Hence, I here would like to limit it into a part of the
large education terms which is ‘teaching and learning’. It happens everywhere
and every time when every teacher, student, parent, educator refers to
schooling or studying. The teacher who is the most model for the students in
class and during their study should be aware of this setting. Providing a conducive
and advantageous atmosphere related to their teaching methods in classrooms is
a must. Applying the entrepreneurship values would be challenging for teachers
because recently they are using conventional approaches in teaching like lecturing,
reading articles or text, watching movies, listening to talks, writing
narration, etc. Instead, the process of entrepreneurship education would be
focusing on more to entrepreneurship values and practices. They are introduced
to the learning situations like how to set up a business, modest research on
selling products or needed services, build a business network and relation,
conduct negotiation, etc. Students could play roles with their classmates, do
research online or text-book, present new ideas, invite and work in small scale
with entrepreneurs around the school area, and so on, or even the real and
practicing entrepreneurs can teach or be invited to deal with the students
directly. All the conventional teaching ways could be implemented here with the
entrepreneurship learning process embraced during in class.
Those student activities could be carried out not
only in business subjects but in other classroom subjects as well. Most of
times, entrepreneurship education is suitably delivered only in specific
related-business subjects and economy or in vocational education. While actually
this issue should have been spread out since the kids grow. It is a long life
process and learning. Apply these values in every lesson/subject in every
classroom, find and select interesting topics and activities which could
encourage them to be creative, innovative in many ways, independent, quickly
decide on something but with criticism and applicable risk. So, teacher, what
is your subject to teach? How would you adapt the lesson to the entrepreneurial
values so far?
Take an example of English language subject taught in
classrooms, especially in English Conversation and Business English classes. In
this particular subject, there are a lot of topics can be used in classrooms.
By selecting certain materials like having selected topics, questions and
exercises, student interactions, and by providing specific situations
correspond with economy or business backgrounds, students would practice their
creativity in finding answers, solutions, (not restricted to that) identifying
opportunity in every chance, building cooperation among peers and being
independent learners in order to have some issues researched, then presented or
reported to their classmates, etc. The result could be either satisfying for
both parties (student and teacher) or unsuccessful but as long as it is their
efforts, so it would be very useful for their initiating creativity. Hence, it
is a sort of their enrichment to be ready for future challenge.
This method is supposed to have begun from elementary
level to higher education, integrated in every aspect of teaching and students’
activities, embedded in any school subjects by performing smart selection on
suitably chosen topics, use of materials, applying activities and even extracurricular
activities related to the previous essential values discussed above. So, it
wouldn’t much focus on the teaching but
more to the learning.
Beside activities done in classrooms, school or
campus could provide student events that correlated with what they have been
stimulated previously in the classrooms so there is a continuous link between
what they get in class and how they practice in life, somehow still under
school direction.
When school/campus is ready to provide this conducive
environment for students, actively involved in school or classroom activities
which nurture creativity, innovative ideas and trial and error (indication to
start taking calculated risk learning), then how about the teacher? How far our
teachers ready for that?
As teachers, they might not assure what their
students are going to be, being entrepreneurs or employees at company or
government institutions, but teachers could shape their mentality with
knowledge and motivational experience during in school and facilitate them with
students’ involvement in many ways based on varied lessons actively. This can
be done in every school, even in non-business school. As one of the worldly
management thinkers, Peter Drucker, has said that the entrepreneurial mystique
is not magic, not mysterious and has nothing to do with the genes but it’s
discipline. Like any discipline, it can be learned (1985)
.
Implementing
Creativity in Creative Classroom Topics
Creative classroom topics are subjects or lessons to
teach in classroom which particularly contain entrepreneurship related-issues.
It doesn’t mean that all subjects presented must be all about business,
although it is also included. Creativity should be brought by creative
teachers, instead. It’s impossible to insist students to be creative while the
teachers are not. It can be seen through the way how teachers explain lessons,
instruct to act, encourage and motivate students to creatively generate new
ideas, identify problems and find solutions as well and look for better chance
of taking an action.
Assessing creativity education is integral part that
teacher should be aware when applying his/her techniques in classroom teaching
in order to generate potential benefits for both teacher and student (Richard,
Norman, Sharon, 1997). Teacher should know the student level and interest in
giving them task, focus on student’s self study in order to gain their full
engagement and independence, and allow them to participate in any scientific
practice and technology exploration
to have
self-experience on sensible and workable situations. Furthermore, tolerance to
any mistakes during engagement is seen as a learning process for them to act
better afterwards.
For example, a
few topics are closely related to what have been discussed whole above:
- Describing, Comparing and Evaluating Products.
This topic would lead them to search kinds of products in market then they
learn the details of the product to compare between one to the others,
describe the plus and minus of it, later on they could evaluate it of how
it is successfully sold out, favored by market or unluckily rejected by market.
Afterwards, students could practice to find opportunity of what product is
likeable and beneficial to be offered into market, etc.
- Are you a good negotiator?
Students learn how to identify their negotiation types, know the
correlation between negotiation type with their personality, prepare
making negotiation based on a given business circumstance, etc. Teacher
can draw their attention, curiosity and alternatives in dealing with such
issue.
- Use an article “Online Psychic”.
This topic is probably unique but peculiar to common students (or even
teachers, I assumed). After they read the reading text of Online Psychic,
they may wonder why this topic is brought into their class while they
mostly deal with no psychic activities or issues in life. But, it is a
fact that many people in the world do consultation to this particular
online service. So, they could see ‘economy opportunity’ here as another
service/product that sought after by people or customers. Shortly, they could come up with their
own ideas of services they could offer to market, then create steps of how
to develop and take it into action.
Students
Feedback
Students always welcome the fact of when they are
faced by challenges nowadays. They love coming to class when they feel that in
there they learn how to solve a problem. Giving them task that requires their
thoughtfulness, tactics, chance and problem identification, giving solution,
etc, is something they search because they can practice themselves to overcome
issues that probably they will face someday in future.
Student’s interest to study is influenced by either
internal or external factors. Teacher plays role on this external one.
Maintaining their enthusiasm, interest, curiosity and lack of boredom is a
challenge for any teacher.
Closing
Reshaping entrepreneurship education Indonesia is an issue
that needs to be stated, spread out more widely than ever due to rapidly
changing economic situations recently. Many entrepreneurs or business people
start their success business based on their personal talent. Anyway,
entrepreneurship is not only about business creation but also about shaping
entrepreneurship mentality with certain values, like innovative, creative,
calculated risk-taking, independence and initiative, ready for change, etc. As
educators, we could apply these good points into our teaching method and
approach to selected lessons/subjects and students as well. It is expected that
it would result in the more successful graduates in the local or worldwide
community. They would succeed as entrepreneurs or as initiative workers in any
working environment.
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