O ensino do empreendedorismo: o papel do docente, os métodos pedagógicos e a sua relação com a intenção empreendedora

Can entrepreneurship be taught, or be learned? This is a question that brings a broad debate to the table. Indubitably, education has an essential role in attitude development and competences promotion. This assumption has fostered entrepreneurship initiatives and course proliferation, seeking to teach entrepreneurship to individuals. The increasing importance of the entrepreneurial spirit leads to the creation and promotion of entrepreneurship initiatives and encouragement of youngsters to have entrepreneurial profiles. Today, entrepreneurship education has a crucial role promoting entrepreneurial mindset s in younger people. It stimulates competence and skill development, which extends beyond the business world. The effects of such education depend on strategy and teaching pedagogies, but mostly on its effective implementation. This gives teachers and higher education institutions the challenge of finding nontraditional methodologies and alternative ways to teach the subject. Therefore, this study aims to explore, through the theory of planned behavior, the effects of entrepreneurship education and its relationship with entrepreneurial intention. Additionally, the essential and challenging role of the teacher is explored, contributing to a better understanding of its significance in entrepreneurship education that is remarkably poorly explored in the literature. Findings reinforce the strength of the theory of planned behavior as an intention measure; in addition, students were found to increase their entrepreneurial intentions, entrepreneurial knowledge and institutional context perceptions after taking a higher education course. Concerning teachers, a consensus was found between their education aims and similarities among their pedagogic methods, topics and forms of evaluation, along with time and resource management struggles.