PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION TECHNICAL VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING COLLEGE LECTURERS’: DO THEY HAVE SUFFICIENT KNOWLEDGE OF CONTENT AND STUDENTS?

 

Molefi Motsoeneng

Central University of Technology, Free State (SOUTH AFRICA), Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), smotsoen@cut.ac.za

 

Abstract

The study’s focus is to explore pedagogical content knowledge of entrepreneurship education, technical vocational education, and training lecturers in the context of their knowledge of content and students. The lecturers' knowledge of the students' conceptions and misconceptions on the entrepreneurship education, as well as the teacher's ability to cope with the students' difficulty, mistake, and misconception, is defined as knowledge of content and students. Central to these tasks is knowledge of common student conceptions and misconceptions about EE content and teaching that sufficiently deals with them. Participatory action research was operationalized to collect data through meetings, class observation, and discussion. The study discovered that entrepreneurship education TVET lecturers struggle to make it more practical. The lecturers experience the problem of having to find the best strategy to deal with students’ misconceptions and mistakes. During class visits, it was revealed that lecturers themselves are unable to recognise students' mistakes. due to a lack of conceptual knowledge of entrepreneurial education. Most of the lecturers are not competent to generate effective teaching strategies due to their limited knowledge of content and students. The study's findings indicate that lecturers' inability to analyse the causes of students' difficulty, error, and misconception is to blame. Lecturers typically overcome students' difficulty, mistake, and misconception by re-explaining the procedure of question completion, which the students do not understand. The papers argue there is a need for a framework to capacitate the lecturers to teach EE effectively.

Keywords: Pedagogical Content Knowledge, entrepreneurship education, knowledge content and students and misconceptions