Entrepreneurship in Preschool Education: Turkish Preservice Teachers’ Entrepreneurship Features, Comparison with their Lecturers’ Views and Suggestions for Development

Abstract

Learning skills and developing competencies at early ages augment its benefits later in life, and therefore, can be effective in the long run. Starting from this point, the paper argues the need for and importance of enterprise education in preschool education. The paper aims to explore preservice preschool teachers’ entrepreneurship features and make suggestions for implementing enterprise education in teacher education programmes. “The Entrepreneurship for Teacher Candidates Scale” was employed with 184 preservice preschool teachers, followed by interviews with four of their lecturers. Descriptive statistics and two-way ANOVA was used to analyse the quantitative data, and thematic analysis was used for the qualitative data. Overall, the results showed that preservice preschool teachers’ perception of their level of entrepreneurship features was high, which was not agreed by lecturers except for self-confidence. The results of two-way ANOVA did not indicate any significant difference (p>.05) for any of the factors investigated (i.e., gender, year of study, taking entrepreneurship courses previously, and/or having an entrepreneur in the family). This means that participants had similar scores and have similar levels of entrepreneurship features. Having no impact of the year of study and entrepreneurship courses attended previously on participants’ entrepreneurial features may suggest the revision of preschool teacher education programmes and the content development targeting such features. Finally, practice-based, active, and collaborative teaching is suggested rather than theory-based teaching for enterprise education in preschool teacher education programmes. Teacher-academics meetings, seminars and workshops about enterprise education are suggested for professional development of preschool teachers.