Teacherpreneur – Another new word coined

Thu, Sep 4, 2008

Education, Revolution

Jeff used a word recently that I love: Teacherpreneur. Personally, I’m fascinated by the intersection of education and entrepreneurship. Why? Let me list thee reasons…

#1 – Education has had almost no entrepreneurship. Ever. Try this mental exercise. Think of a teacher who made a million dollars. Or one who invented something revolutionary. Or created a “disruptive” teaching method or technology. Yeah, no doubt there are some examples. But there are so few and far in between as to cause one to shake their head.

#2 – Education is a huge industry with lots of value flowing in and out. Students pay tuition. Parents pay for tutoring, supplemental classes and books. Teachers get paid. Publishers make insane margins. And yet what do we typically see year after year…status quo. Compare this with other areas of society that are moving at hyper-speed right now. You kinda get the feeling that if entrepreneurs didn’t get involved then teaching would be pretty much the same in 10/20/30/40 years. Fortunately, the entrepreneurs are getting involved.

#3 – Why shouldn’t there be an opportunity to set up your home-based education business? 10 years it was *really* difficult to set up a home-based business selling products. Now, because of people like this it’s insanely easy. Not just the tech either…the support. The community. The whole experience that causes people to spend their entire day on Etsy even if it’s only bringing them a few hundred dollars a month.

#4 – Teachers are bright people. OK, not all of them. :) But so many of them are creative, brilliant, innovative, etc. Yet for decades they’ve been stuffed inside this little box and told what to teach, how to teach, when to teach, etc. Essentially emasculated by a stifling system that punishes, rather than rewards, fresh approaches and contrarian thinking.

#5 – It didn’t always used to be this way. Here’s a mind-blowing quote from Gatto’s A Different Kind of Teacher:

Before the so-called “progressive” era in this country there was a vast and impressive non-system of great diversity and autonomy in American education. No one claimed there was any one “best system” and attempted to force it on everyone. According to Lawrence Cremin, a historian of American schools, “Virtually anyone who could command a clientele could conduct classes…Anyone could teach and anyone could learn — and the market, rather than the church or the legislature, governed through many types of contractual relationships.” It was this interplay of opportunities that created the resourcefulness, the industry, and the ingenuity that President John Adams associated with New England town and which dazzled the world.

You can basically break the world into two types of people. The people who figure that the world will never change and do there best to fit themselves into the world the way it is. And the people who know the world will only change if people like themselves refuse to accept the status quo. Or in RFK’s words:

There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

We’re gonna do the latter and therefore we’re gonna ride the teacherpreneur meme. There are 144 results on Google right now for that term.

Let’s hope that when all is said and done there are a few million results. Can’t think of something that would move the world more.

First is the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills — against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world’s great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. “Give me a place to stand,” said Archimedes, “and I will move the world.” These men moved the world, and so can we all. – RFK

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This post was written by:

reg - who has written 27 posts on The eduFire Blog.


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Viewing 7 Comments

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    • v
    aw shucks. did i coin a phrase?
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    I work at The Open University and perhaps because it started something unique when it was founded in the 70's - distance education in the UK - it has a lot of teacherpreneurs who thrive on teaching differently and finding new ways to teach. The OpenLearn website is one example of how they have changed the educational landscape - free resources made available under a Creative Commons license, an open source virtual learning environment and tools such as knowledge mapping, idea mapping and video blogging integrated to help learners make sense of the resources and work together to solve problems. The next OU project is SocialLearn and I think that takes us further down the road of enabling entrepreneurship in education... but it's in development so more on that another day!
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    I am a Teacherpreneur in the area of music education!! I found this site by happenstance in the great blogosphere. There is no doubt that teaching and entrepreneurship deserve to share a place at the the proverbial table.

    We at the Dallas School of Music have been in the business of music education for over 15 years and I believe that privatization can be a win-win situation for both the student and teacher. In our case, we offer world class music education to people of all ages and all levels of ability - on all instruments. That's something academia cannot (and does not) do.

    I also believe that privatization can actually SAVE our entire profession. As budgets dwindle and arts/music courses are slashed, shouldn't we be training future music educators to be more business savvy? In the very least, they should be made aware of options outside of academia and entrepreneur courses should be included in their curriculum. There is no doubt that more teacherpreneurs would make a better, healthier environment across the board.

    Kudos!
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    The term has been around for quite a while - Nov 2006 was when I blogged it. http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2006/11/clas...

    It is difficult to attribute these terms to anyone, though. Although I'm the first person that I recall using it, I don't know all knowledge.

    A while back, I used the term Web 3D, and was accused of "stealing" the term from another person when in fact, I'd never heard the term, it was just a natural progression for me. The other person had used it years before me, but did they "invent" the term, I just don't think so.

    Terms just seem to evolve - however this is an important term to use, I think. (See http://www.slideshare.net/coolcatteacher/google... from this summer).

    We need to give teachers the ability to customize our classrooms and to shape the curriculum to meet the objectives instead of having prescriptive things handed down.

    I do think, that where these sorts of things go astray is when people "steal" terms and don't attribute, but that is something we'll never know as it is in the heart of an individual.
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    Vicki - your admonition about claiming to coin the term teacherpreneur seems a little self-serving to me. If you had referenced multiple locations where the term had been used in the past, that would have been more subtle. However, referencing your own post and stating that you were the first you know of to post it is a way of implying that you think you may have coined the term. Your current post does to Jeff what was done to you in the March 2007 post that you reference here. In any case, your comments did exactly what you told him he should not do. Just my 2 cents.
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    I have been using the term since at least 2004. Here's the address in the Way Back Machine from archive.org:
    http://web.archive.org/web/20040824234900/www.m...

    I didn't "coin" the term, either. It went around in teaching circles briefly as a code word for partnering with local businesses to expose students to the "real world." That seems to have gone by the wayside along with the web pages that used to refer to it.

    I home schooled other people's using a consensus run small group format for 6-12 year olds in which we used the community as the primary learning resource. Instead of bringing a bunch of kids about the same age into a room, bringing a bunch of resources into the room and then telling the kids what to do with them, I did the opposite. I got as age diverse a group as possible, went out into the commnunity with them to discover resources and then worked with them to figure out what to do.

    The business model wasn't sustainable, though that was in the late 90's and online support resources didn't exist yet.

    --
    Enjoy,

    Don Berg

    Site: http://www.teach-kids-attitude-1st.com
    Blog: blog.Attitutor.com
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    There are too many so called Entreprenreurs who don't even know the meaning of Entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is someone who's doing things different and someone who's taking a huge risk. So what are the Teacherpreneur good at? There's a saying, "Those Who Can...Do, Those Who Can't .....Teach."
 

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