Building Sandcastles: Materiality, time, and space in entrepreneurship education

In this paper we focus on a hitherto somewhat overlooked aspect of entrepreneurship education, namely the influence of materiality and spatial context on the process of teaching and learning. In the paper we present an empirical examination oriented towards the material and spatial dimensions of entrepreneurship education. Our theoretical and methodological approach builds on Actor-Network Theory. The empirical settings of our study consist of two entrepreneurship courses which differ in terms of temporal extension and physical setting. Data is collected using observation and interview techniques. Our findings demonstrate the agency of material artefacts and how they enable teachers to act at a distance, by standing in as a scaffold that maintains the learning space as it interacts with the students. This acting at a distance however is highly uncertain and uncontrollable. Also we see how important the infrastructure of the learning environment is, and we argue that establishing a good and working infrastructure reduces resistance towards enabling positive learning experiences.