Langupreneurship: What L2 Teachers and Administrators Need to Know

Mazandarani, Omid

doi:10.3389/feduc.2022.810389

OPINION article

Front. Educ., 01 June 2022

Sec. Higher Education

Volume 7 - 2022 | https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.810389

This article is part of the Research Topic Pedagogic Innovation and Student Learning in Higher Education: Perceptions, Practices and Challenges View all 23 articles

Langupreneurship: What L2 Teachers and Administrators Need to Know

$\nOmid Mazandarani$ Omid Mazandarani^*

Department of English Language Teaching, Aliabad Katoul Branch, Islamic Azad University, Aliabad Katoul, Iran

Introduction

It is not a long time since science and technology parks (STPs) and incubation industry have come to their own in education sector. The idea appears to owe its reputation to business and management domains. Business incubation gained much of its momentum in the 1980s in several countries across the globe (Tamásy, 2007, p. 460). Such initiatives have helped policymakers with their quest for best practices (Phan et al., 2005). In particular, universities have made pioneering attempt to invest in business incubators (Redondo and Camarero, 2019). Universities and higher education institutions have traditionally contributed to the dissemination of human knowledge and scholarship pertinent to society, economy, and environment (Liyanage and Andrade, 2012, p. 203). It is widely argued that STPs provide the ground for knowledge and technology transfer among different sectors stimulating quality research and innovation (Moyano-Fuentes et al., 2018; Steruska et al., 2019). There happened a paradigm shift in universities' role in the society, in that universities tend to be expected to move beyond their traditional roles, i.e. teaching and research, to more modern and sophisticated roles as a source of knowledge and technology, transfer, and exchange (Bellucci and Pennacchio, 2016, p. 2) contributing to economic development and prosperity (Bercovitz and Feldman, 2006). Such a paradigm shift has seemingly imposed certain obligations on the main stakeholders including teachers and students. Both teachers and students' achievements as a criterion in universities ranking system tend to contribute to universities' international reputation. To this end, higher education sector has witnessed a movement toward ‘innovation' as a precious commodity, which as Feldman et al. (2019, p. 1), contend, is likely to emerge in an “entrepreneurial ecosystem”. It is argued that amid the fervent demand for teachers multitask responsibilities including innovativeness and creativity, the concept of teacher as entrepreneurs, i.e. teacherpreneur has just started to gain a position in higher education. Despite the overwhelming pressure on the part of policymakers and administrators, there remains a concern as to the extent to which teachers and hence students are informed of the logistics involved in entrepreneurial behavior. Teachers' involvement with entrepreneurial behavior is by no means a straightforward process. As the literature suggests, there exist several concerns about the effectuation of teacher entrepreneurship one of which could be possibly the extent to which policymakers and administrators believe in and pledge full support for fostering teachers' entrepreneurial literacy, and take practical measures to maximize entrepreneurial opportunities for teachers. Moreover, research has shown that there is a lack of consensus on the definition of the concept of entrepreneurship (Arruti and Paños-Castro, 2020, p. 825), let alone definitions of the concept of teacherpreneurship, whose understanding requires a requisite awareness of the fundamental tenets of entrepreneurship. One key concern in entrepreneurship education is competency. Research has revealed that entrepreneurial competencies and intention are two important factors related to entrepreneurship education (Sánchez, 2013, p. 447). As a consequence, formulating a conceptual framework of the competencies is an indispensable part of research into teacherpreneurship. The literature on entrepreneurship hosts numerous studies on competencies needed for entrepreneurial behavior. For instance, based on their findings, Arruti and Paños-Castro (2020, p. 837), introduce several main competences for teachers among which are creativity, innovation, perseverance, motivation, etc. Lasekan and Malik (2020, p. 163), propose a model for online teacherpreneurship competency. Although the bulk of literature is already established in mainstream general education, it is simply silent with some sparse research on teachers and students' entrepreneurial literacy in L2 contexts, where research on EFL/ESL teachers' entrepreneurial behavior is rather erratic. According to The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in order to pursue their studies, more than 5.6 million tertiary students crossed a border throughout the world in 2018 (OECD, 2020, p. 228). Given the increasing number of international students, there appears a need for incorporating entrepreneurial education in L2 contexts, where medium of instruction is most likely different from teachers and students' mother tongue. In general, knowing additional languages has long been considered a prestigious quality for individuals. In some contexts, English knowledge tends to be a special privilege which helps individuals perform exceptionally well in their careers, securing employment (Jakubiak, 2020, p. 21). Furthermore, World Englishes and nativisation and Englishisation phenomena (Kachru, 1992, p. 7), makes research into L2 contexts a special domain for entrepreneurship enquiry. This paper, therefore, is an attempt to highlight such a lacuna in the literature, bringing to the fore, the notion of langupreneurship, which allows teachers and students to incubate, exploit, improvise, and execute their entrepreneurial literacy for betterment of their professional and educational experience, actualizing their visions.

Teacherpreneurship and Langupreneurship

It has not been long since the concepts of ‘entrepreneurship' and ‘intrapreneurship' have been introduced in business, management, and leadership studies. More recently the concepts received further attention in education. Informed by the very concept of entrepreneurship, more recently, “edupreneurship” and “technopreneurship” have emerged in the past few years conveying a message similar to entrepreneurship, which as the relevant literature suggests is to identify, explore, and exploit profitable entrepreneurial opportunities (e.g., Shane and Venkataraman, 2000, p. 217; Ulhøi, 2005). Most recently teacherpreneurship has come to existence. Research into the features of teacherpreneurship is still in its infancy (Arruti and Paños-Castro, 2020, p. 825). As a blend of teachers and entrepreneurs, teacherpreneurs are teachers who “continue to teach while having time, space, and incentives to incubate big pedagogical and policy ideas and execute them in the best interests of both their students and their teaching colleagues” (Berry et al., 2013, p. 16). Research has also shown that teachers with high level of entrepreneurial behavior tend to consider their professional development (Neto et al., 2019). Teaching in L2 context is an intricate career in which millions of dollars and hours are invested globally. In line with mass higher education movement in the past decade, teachers have extensively been demanded to undertake more diversified responsibilities and commitments to different stakeholders including administrators, peers, and students. Teacherpreneurship, amongst other duties, is the one with which rarely are teachers familiar. A quick glance over the syllabi (e.g., practicum) of MA and PhD in TESOL/applied linguistics programs, initial teacher education programs, in-service teacher professional development programs in different universities around the world substantiates the idea that most teachers tend to be alienated to concepts such as entrepreneurship throughout their academic and in-service education. The concept of incubation is rather polysemic (Aernoudt, 2004), unclear (Bergek and Norrman, 2008), and convoluted in practice. University incubators are mostly known for helping entrepreneurs identify business opportunities, produce viability plans, launching new ventures, provide infrastructure and facilities, and consolidate new firms (Roig-Tierno et al., 2015). From among different major types of incubators (Grimaldi and Grandi, 2005), university incubators can help teachers and students with typical incubator services (e.g., offices) and university-specific services (e.g., education and development) (Barbero et al., 2014). Informed by a similar theoretical imperative, langupreneurship represents an idea whose time has come. Belittling the futile producer-consumer dichotomy, langupreneurs are language teachers and students who move beyond their traditional roles. They are expected to exploit their multitasking abilities for betterment of their outside-the-classroom experience and career. Langupreneurs are expected to fall back on their entrepreneurial skills to create new profitable situations by “other than teaching” activities such as running test preparation companies, educational software, and material development ventures. As such, not only can langupreneurs bring about meaningful and positive changes to their own professional development and empowerment, but they can also help reformulation and improvement of educational policy and practice. Despite langupreneurs' profit-making mission, it is worth noting that langupreneurship is not all about business, even though as Berry (2011, p. 32), posits, one may not deny expert teachers' right to “sell” their pedagogical and professional knowledge and expertise. Similar to what Berry (2011 p. 33), argues for teacherprenursip, langupreneurship should be more conceptualized as a mentality for creativity and innovation. For this to come to fruition and to foster their entrepreneurial mindsets, L2 teachers need to acquaint themselves with different definitions, practices, competencies, and factors needed for boosting teacherpreneurial or the newly coined concept of langupreneurial behavior. it is widely accepted that language is closely related to various sectors of a society, e.g. culture. Langupreneurship can support the socio-economic development and secure revenue sources in a number of ways, e.g. science diplomacy and tourism industry, where English as an international language (EIL) plays an important role. Further research is needed to unveil the minutiae of such a revenue process.

Concluding Remarks

Despite the burgeoning literature on teacher education, teachers and students' entrepreneurial behavior has been left unnoticed. The traditional conception of teacher-student as transmitter-receiver of knowledge continues to permeate most educational context around the word which is utterly opposed to the central tenets of knowledge economy movement. In line with Arruti and Paños-Castro's (2020, p. 837), call for renewal of teacher education curriculum, this paper argues for rethinking of preservice and in-service teacher education programs, whereby future teacherpreneurs are educated; those who have the capacity to engender and instill langupreneurship into their students. Not only can learning entrepreneurship skills help teachers themselves, but it also can help them teach their students to become langupreneurs. University incubators may help language teachers and students become langupreneurs, i.e. language entrepreneurs, those who are able to identify and foster various field-specific opportunities and are active agents in marketization and commercialization of their education, incubating their skills, knowledge, talents, expertise, and visions. It is, therefore, an imperative for administrators to understand and meet such an emergent need, prepare teachers for the new role, and engender entrepreneurial mindset in them by revisiting the existing teacher professional development programs. Given the multidimensional nature of langupreneurship, further empirical research is needed to explore the characteristics, practices, and competencies of langupreneurs, delving into how they may bring about (positive) changes to the society and its constituent sectors with a special focus on education sector.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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References

Aernoudt, R (2004). Incubators: tool for entrepreneurship? Small Bus. Econ. 23, 127–135. doi: 10.1023/B:SBEJ.0000027665.54173.23