Preparing students for meaningful entrepreneurial careers: Two Australian case studies

Free to read on publishers website In Australia, the creative industries are seen as vital to the development of a prosperous, creative and imaginative nation. This paper explores the potential of school-industry creative partnerships and addresses the necessary development of entrepreneurial behaviour in music education offering new premises on which to build a teaching/learning approach, which is better suited to future contexts. The paper follows two Australian case studies; the first case study traces a group of 15-17 year old music students who have developed their own music industry enterprise. The second case study follows a group of 8-14 year old music students who develop creativity, musicianship and confidence in collaboration with industry professionals. Our research asks how the participants developed entrepreneurial attributes through learning in situ. In order to explore this question we frame the study with Lave and Wenger’s social learning theories of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991) and Communities of Practice (1998), guided by the concepts of entrepreneurial learning as framed by Johannisson (1991). Our cases suggest that linking with communities of practice that lie outside of schools is one way to empower music programmes to move in entrepreneurial directions.