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1. Introduction
Entrepreneurship education (EE) in higher education continues to be of interest for policy makers, educators and researchers (e.g. Fayolle, 2013; Lackéus and Williams Middleton, 2015), particularly given recent calls to embed EE into the programmes of all students, irrespective of their chosen discipline or level of study (Rae et al., 2012). While this approach most likely holds many benefits for students and the economy as a whole, it comes at a time when the field of EE is still emerging and as such might pose challenging and potentially insurmountable issues for educators newly faced with the requirement to deliver some form of EE. One underdeveloped aspect of the field refers to the fact that its educational practices do not explicitly link to established and proven educational frameworks (Bechard and Gregoire, 2006; Fayolle, 2013; Jones et al., 2014).
As such, it is the aim of this paper to propose a novel conceptual framework of EE, which explicitly links EE practice to established and proven educational theory. More specifically, the paper presents “Authentic Alignment”, a conceptual framework that brings together a number of well-known educational theories – above all “Constructive Alignment (CA)” (Biggs, 1996) and “Authenticity” (Gulikers et al., 2004) – and explicitly links EE practice to sound educational theory. By achieving this aim, the paper (and the Authentic Alignment framework within the paper) therefore contributes pedagogical and theoretical value to the field of EE: its pedagogical contribution refers to the novel framework’s ability to support educators in their endeavours to embed EE into every student’s curriculum by offering a clear and educationally sound framework for the development and delivery of EE; the paper’s theoretical contribution lies in the fact that Authentic Alignment clearly and explicitly links EE practice to two major educational theories, thus not only proposing a novel combination of these two theories, but also addressing a gap in the current EE literature as the latter is still criticised for not linking practice to established frameworks.
The next section details the setting, in which Authentic Alignment evolved, followed by an overview of its underlying education theories. Subsequently, the paper presents a detailed discussion of Authentic Alignment in light of extant EE literature, the authors’ own reflections and experiences, as well...