Integrating Constructivist Pedagogical Approaches into Chinese Entrepreneurship Education through Value Creation Pedagogy

The Chinese Ministry of Education (MoE) has directed higher education institutions to implement entrepreneurship education across all disciplines. Contemporaneously the MoE enacted reforms to encourage educators to use student-centred pedagogy, which encourages active participation, critical inquiry, problem-solving skills, and teamwork. This marked a shift from focusing solely on teacher-centred pedagogy, and a traditional emphasis on passive learning, with which educators and students were accustomed. It is common for both educators and students to prefer and gravitate to teaching approaches which they are familiar. Value creation pedagogy, where students seek to create something of value to external stakeholders and learn and develop entrepreneurial competences and behaviours from the experience, has been posited as an effective way to bridge the gap between traditional and progressive education. Value creation pedagogy offers structure, linkage to the entrepreneurial process, the opportunity for collaborative teamwork, and student engagement by allowing students to follow their interests and passions. This chapter discusses and espouses the potential for value creation pedagogy to offer students the opportunity to engage in more practical student-centred entrepreneurship, by mitigating challenges to the transitioning to constructivist entrepreneurship education and reducing tensions between traditional and progressive education that exist in the Chinese context.