Amy Fielden and Patrick Rosenkranz recently presented their paper: Enterprise challenges in Psychology: enhancing psychological literacy through entrepreneurial learning at the DART-P (Division of Academics, Researchers and Teachers in Psychology – BPS Division) conference in Birmingham.

Here’s the abstract and if you want more information about this work please contact amy.fielden@ncl.ac.uk or patrick.rosenkranz@ncl.ac.uk

Abstract

Psychology as a discipline and profession is not readily associated with what is commonly known as entrepreneurship, the process of designing, launching and running new business ventures. However, developing aspects of an entrepreneurial mindset and attitude are pivotal for a fully psychologically literate graduate: this mindset includes the ability to draw upon resources such as psychological knowledge and skills, and then use these to realize psychological ideas in the real world, i.e. benefiting themselves, their community or society as a whole. Entrepreneurial learning processes provide an opportunity for students in psychology to apply their growing knowledge to a real-world setting, and for enhancing and advancing their psychological literacy and employability. We created a teaching and learning model called an ‘Enterprise Challenge’ in collaboration with a number of mental health charities and embedded these at various stages of the undergraduate degree programme.  Students are presented with a brief, which constitutes the main task of the challenge and then work in groups to develop their ideas. Tasks and brief are designed to represent real-life problems or issues and the challenge for the students is to develop a product, service or initiative that addresses these issues. In the process of developing the idea, students need to consider practical, financial and ethical constraints. The challenge culminates in a pitch given by the students to a panel of judges who evaluate the feasibility, and creativity of the idea. In this talk we will present the rationale of these challenges and how embedding entrepreneurial processes in the psychology curriculum can aid the development of psychological literacy.