The field of Educational Sciences at the service of the field of Sustainable entrepreneurship education: A critical re-reading of Competence Frameworks

Objectives: This conceptual paper aims to critically look at competence frameworks for sustainable entrepreneurship education while challenging the very notion of competence as defined in the educational sciences. Approaches: The research design is constructed around three phases related to the main research question and the two related preliminary sub-research questions. The major methodology of critical ethnography of type 3 of Alvesson & Skoldberg (2000) has been used for the critical re-reading goal of this study. The PRISMA approach of Page & al. (2021) has been also used for conducting a systematic review of the literature on competences for sustainable entrepreneurship. Results: As a result, this paper shows up that existing competence frameworks for SE education poorly apply the term competence as defined and used in the educational sciences. First, the identification of related resources for each competence is sometimes absent or sometimes not appropriately used in frameworks identified. Then, none of the frameworks detected in the literature deal with the presence of a hierarchical classification of competence’ mastery and their related resources. Finally, none of them associate each competence and the related resources with specific pedagogical methods or assessment methods, despite the insight of Biggs (2003) about constructive alignment. Implications: This paper illustrates an overview of the current literature on competences for sustainable entrepreneurship while tracing the construction of related frameworks in a school context. Our research also helps to better understand the concept of competence as defined and used in the educational sciences to bring clear instructions about its application in sustainable entrepreneurship courses. The importance of a deep construction of learning outcomes according to competence-based learning is emphasized as well as the pedagogical methods and the assessments tools used to develop and ensure the mastery of competences by students. Consequently, this interdisciplinarity and critical aspect of the research reveals multiple research avenues on elements to consider when designing a competence framework for sustainable entrepreneurship education. Originality: This paper contributes to the emerging research field in sustainable entrepreneurship education while providing a critical and interdisciplinary research linking the domain of sustainable entrepreneurship research with the educational sciences