Emotional Experience in Entrepreneurship Education: Emotion as a Learning Dynamics

Abstract

Few studies propose a kind of entrepreneurship education based on experience, although many researches have pointed out that experience is essential for entrepreneurship development. If experience becomes the axis of education, we cannot think of experience without emotion. The relationship between emotion and entrepreneurship education based on experience needs to be better understood. The purpose of this article is to develop knowledge about that relationship, as we focused on the concept of emotional dynamics and the empirical study of educational practices among students of a management undergraduate program at a Brazilian university. Based on the analysis of information obtained from diverse sources (systematic observation, documents, interviews and photos), the emotional dynamics that sustain entrepreneurship education is described, categorized and discussed. The research results contribute to improve the theoretical framework of research on entrepreneurship education. The findings also reveal how fundamental emotions are in order to understand the process of being an entrepreneur.