Investigating youth agency in experiential entrepreneurship education
The Youth Agency and Learning Lab was created in 2023 by Professor Joseph Levitan, Ph.D. at McGill University (Canada) in partnership with Udhyam Learning Foundation (India). The lab focuses on understanding the processes to develop youth agency to improve society through participation in an experiential entrepreneurship education curriculum across Grades 9-12 in government run schools in Delhi, India. Using participatory action research, the lab investigates changes in students’ agency, wellbeing, and decision making. The lab is currently engaged in a longitudinal study using qualitative and quantitative methodologies to understand the process and products of the Udhyam curriculum. In particular, the lab examines long-term outcomes and impact of the curriculum on students’ lives. Because we use mixed research methods, the lab is uniquely positioned to conduct comprehensive evaluations of mindsets, entrepreneurship, agency, wellbeing, and 21st century skills.
Currently in India, 73% of students leave education before the post-secondary level. Moreover 93% of the workforce is employed in the informal sector with few opportunities for personal advancement and career growth. There have been growing calls for educational systems to enable students to become ‘job creators’ rather than ‘job seekers’, by helping students to become more agentic in their personal and career decisions. This impetus can be achieved through a focus on supporting students to become more entrepreneurial as they graduate from high school. However, little to no research exists on the impact of entrepreneurship education on youth agency particularly in the South Asian context.
Since its inception, the Udhyam Learning Foundation has run entrepreneurship education programs for youth across government schools in Delhi that emphasizes experiential learning through engagement in curricula based on mindset transformations and real-world entrepreneurial projects. With a framework built around transformative agency, the curriculum incorporates and responds to the realities of students’ lived experiences, current economic and social contexts, and calls to focus on student agency, wellbeing, and entrepreneurial mindsets. The lab seeks to investigate the impact of programs such as these on youth agency to gather evidence to inform curriculum development, pedagogy, and larger national and state policy around formal education.
The lab breaks down traditional silos between the researcher and the researched by adopting a participatory action framework. It brings together expertise in educational pedagogy, entrepreneurship education, sociology along with practitioner perspectives. It also provides a collaborative space to address educational and strategic challenges present in the Indian educational landscape today. By co-designing evaluative tools, contextualizing data collection protocols with a diverse group of stakeholders, the lab fosters creative approaches to create solutions for student agency at scale.
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