Pushing the entrepreneurial prodigy: Canadian Aboriginal entrepreneurship education initiatives

Publication

Critical Studies in Education

Journal Volume

57(3), 358-375

Date Published

01/01/2016

Authors

Pinto, L. E., & Blue, L. E.

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Globally, neoliberal education policy touts youth entrepreneurship education as a solution for staggering youth unemployment, a means to bolster economically depressed regions, and solution to the ill-defined changing marketplace. Many jurisdictions have emphasized a need for K-12 entrepreneurial education for the general population, and targeted to youth labeled ‘at risk’. The Martin Aboriginal Education Initiative’s Aboriginal Youth Entrepreneurship Program (AYEP) has been enacted across Canada. This paper applies critical discourse analysis to a corpus of texts, exposing how colonial practices, deficit discourse, and discursive neoliberalism are embedded and perpetuated though entrepreneurial education targeted at Aboriginal students via AYEP.

Keywords: entrepreneurship education, entrepreneurial education, education policy, Aboriginal education, indigenous education