Social Entrepreneurship and Partnership, Two Gamechangers in Building Childhood Agency
According to the EYLF Framework, what are the 5 learning outcomes?
- Identity
- Connection and contribution
- Wellbeing
- Confidence and involvement
- Effective communication
What are the 5 Ps of social entrepreneurship?
- Passion
- Purpose
- Plan
- Partner
- Profit
What's the 10-10-10 Rule for Kids
The 10-10-10 Rule for Kids is a way to help kids think about things that can happen as a result of actions. It encourages kids to think about what might happen as a result of an action in the next 10 minutes, the next 10 months, and then the next ten years.
Children are well aware of the world around them. Stories in the news and conversations held by loved ones present these realities through a lens that’s filtered but still very much felt. What life experience has not yet taught children is that they can have agency. This article explores how parents and educators can partner together and use social entrepreneurship principles as a key to unlock agency and encourage innovation and the processing of complex emotions.
The Early Years Learning Framework and What it Teaches About Childhood Education
In 2009, Australia introduced the Early Years Learning Framework. The framework is marked by 5 learning outcomes that highlight the importance of safety, security, exploration, relationships, and identity to the learning environment. These 5 learning outcomes are:
- Identity: This outcome aims to ensure that young learners feel safe and secure and that they’re operating from a place where they’re confident in their strengths and what they can do.
- Connection and contribution: Young learners begin to understand ideas like what’s fair, relationships, and diversity.
- Wellbeing: Children begin to learn about physical and emotional health and resilience.
- Confident and involved: Kids begin to learn about physical and emotional health and resilience.
- Effective communication: Children begin to harness creativity for the goal of self-expression through symbols, language, and various other media.
In some ways, EYLF builds on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, recognizing the needs that children have for safety and security before they’re able to learn. Social entrepreneurship can be taught in ways that build on this to encourage agency.
For the child at this stage, social entrepreneurship can be used to teach the child about relationships and healthy and appropriate conflict-handling. Through modeling the desired behaviors, both parents and educators can work together to equip children for times in the future when conflict can arise and to self-advocate should the necessity for this arise in the course of this or other relationships.
Social Entrepreneurship and Other Entrepreneurship Styles
Four entrepreneurial styles surface in conversations about business. These are the small business entrepreneur, the scalable startup entrepreneur, the intrapreneur, and the social entrepreneur:
- Small Business: The small business leader has identified their what and that there’s a business opportunity that this what represents. For example, a lawyer who has spent time in the formal education system and in internships notices that there’s an opportunity for them to engage in private practice. Often, this is an entrepreneur with a small business entrepreneurial style.
- Scalable Startup: This entrepreneur has the same starting place as the small business owner, with a notable exception. Their vision is larger. They don’t just want one location. They see the opportunity for expansion and want to go for it.
- Intrapreneur: Expansion is also key to this entrepreneurial style. However, possibilities are discovered from inside of this framework that lend themselves to the innovation of products and services that will bring change to the marketplace and change the standard for others operating inside of it.
- Social Entrepreneurs: These entrepreneurs are present in society and in the world around them. They see a problem happening and are motivated to do something about it.
Because of the nature of social entrepreneurship, it can be a helpful way for kids to process, in a healthy and holistic way, the challenges facing their community that they might not currently have the language to express.
Social Entrepreneurship and Educational Outcomes
Children are explorers by nature, identifying what is through experimentation, hands-on with reality. This natural draw toward testing to see what works and what doesn’t is at the heart of innovation, creating something new. As parents and educators, your approach to teaching innovation for kids will be guided by age-appropriate strategies that allow the child to continue to explore organically. This also means establishing clear boundaries to help children understand the difference between when it’s time for task orientation and when it’s time to engage in unstructured play.
Parents and educators can partner to help establish and hold this boundary through setting strategic outcomes. For educators, measuring educational outcomes starts with the establishment of clear SMART goals for student learning and using those to guide the way curriculum is implemented. For example, an educational outcome set for K-5 readers in the state of Wisconsin involves students learning to have conversations about how a reader’s point of view might be different from the writer, a character in a specific reading, or even a narrator. This kind of educational objective can be brought to life through social entrepreneurship by helping students understand marketing personas that represent the people they’re looking to partner with in their community to work toward solving the problems they’re noticing that are resulting in these complex emotions and feelings of helplessness.
As a parent, you’re in a unique position both in terms of responsibility and in terms of the way that you can support educational outcomes. Because of this, you can engage with your child in ways that allow your child to experience their community both through unstructured play with other kids in your community and through experiences that allow them to more organically engage with those they want to partner with in meeting a community need. Kid-friendly events, including kid-friendly community theater and sports, can be positive places for these interactions to take place.
Building Agency Through Social Entrepreneurship
Accountability is the greatest ability in both one’s personal life and their professional life. However, it’s also difficult to take hold of agency, or the sense of control one has over actions and what happens as a result of one’s actions. In fact, when one doesn’t have a sense of agency, learned helplessness can set in. For adults with more of a solid foundation and a wealth of experience and successes to draw from, resilience helps with recovery from the results of challenges that happen outside of their control. However, the world of a child is different. They don’t have these experiences to draw from. Their world is protected by boundaries they may not understand. Decisions come and go that they may not realize have taken place. Protecting children is vital. Encouraging agency is also important. Social entrepreneurship and innovation enables both in the context of a partnership between parents, kids, and educators.
One strategy parents can adopt to help children understand the relationship between cause and effect and the agency that they do have is the 10-10-10 Rule for Kids. The idea behind the 10-10-10 Rule is that actions lead to what happens after them. For example, if I eat all of the candy now, I might feel ok for now. 10 minutes from now, I might not feel so ok and I might have a stomachache. If I do this only once, I probably won’t experience difficulties from this action 10 months from now or 10 years from now. But, if I let this become a continuous habit, there could definitely be consequences 10 months or even 10 years from now. The 10-10-10 Rule for Kids encourages children to think about what could happen from an action taken now in terms of its effects in terms of the next 10 minutes, the next 10 months, and then the next 10 years.
In connecting this principle with social entrepreneurship, children can be encouraged to think about what can happen as a result of taking action to solve a problem that they’re noticing. A sense of agency is built as children realize that they can do something about things that cause them stress and concern for their community, and that it can make a difference.
How the 5 Ps of Social Entrepreneurship Can Contribute to a Child’s Sense of Agency
I will never forget where I was the day 9-11 happened. We were watching an instructional video in class. Suddenly, there was an interruption as we watched the tragic happenings of that day unfold. People were dying. It wasn’t a movie. I was 10 years old, a 5th grader at the time. I remember walking back from school, half-dazed. I reached the field near the apartment where we lived at that time, the images still in my mind. I made it to the apartment. The adults weren’t back yet. I went to the television in my parents’ room, hoping to watch The Big Guy and Rusty. The same footage of the impact showed on the screen. For some reason, I went to the TV in the dining room. For some reason, I thought the results would be different. They weren’t. It was on every TV. I didn’t know what to do with that. It felt overwhelming. I felt powerless.
Children see and feel much. They might not understand what they see. This disconnect affects the way they experience what’s happening around them. Without agency, powerlessness is the default. Children understand clearly when something is wrong. Here’s how the 5 Ps of social entrepreneurship can help them process this:
Passion.
Passion in social entrepreneurship is when something inspires you to act. This is when the object of that passion is identified. For a child developing a sense of agency, this is that thing that’s bothering your child that they may feel powerless or helpless about. Avoid leading the child in their expressions. Instead, gain an understanding. Ask questions like: What have you heard about this? Where have you heard about this? How do you feel about what you’ve heard?
- Parents: Be prepared for what you might hear. You might hear things that you’re not ready to. For example, you may hear that your child has overheard a conversation you’ve had and that this is causing concern. You may also hear that your child has a friend at school that’s affected by something that’s happening and that it’s this thing coming closer to their lives that is causing them concern. Both instances are opportunities for hearing your child’s concerns and reassuring them in a way that helps them to understand that they are heard and loved.
- Educators: You’re present in the classroom when students are having conversations with friends and peers. Connecting with parents when common concerns surface can help you approach challenges in a spirit of partnership. Building from that partnership, you can introduce topical exploration in the classroom in ways that are in line with educational outcomes and objectives and help students better and more objectively understand the what of their passion in an age-appropriate way.
Purpose.
A child who is concerned about something happening in their community and has had time to explore the what that’s caused concern can now look to the why behind that concern. For example, if a child notices that there’s more pollution in a local lake, they might be concerned about it because of what they’ve seen or heard. After engaging with class materials, they may also discover that the local infrastructure isn’t fully able to filter out pollutants and that some still make it into the drinking water. This could become their why for wanting to do something about water pollution.
- Parents: Engage children in conversations about their why and even encourage them to think about what they might be able to do about their concerns and the possibilities that could come from their actions 10 minutes from now, 10 months from now, and even 10 years from now. This is more about encouraging positive envisioning than planning. Planning comes next. Remember to encourage unstructured play as well to prevent the blurring of lines between the child’s personal and professional lives.
- Educators: Encourage your class to have conversations about their why and to compare and contrast their why with those of others who share the same concern, so they can better understand how to engage with different perspectives and work together with others who think differently. Encourage students to work together to determine a vision statement for the class.
Plan.
Turning hopeful thoughts and vision into action is the purpose of planning. This is also the stage where you’re encouraging students to commit to the work of action to solve for the need they’ve identified.
- Parents: Encourage your child as they begin to look at the possible solutions and how those may be put into action. Continue to encourage unstructured play.
- Educators: Start by reviewing the joint vision statement. Then, encourage students to work together to determine how they’ll achieve that vision. This will further their sense of agency by encouraging all students to speak into the plan and to feel like they have ownership of the plan the class is developing. A good deliverable for planning could be a business plan where each student is responsible for a part of it, as aligned with what’s determined by the class.
Partner.
Partnership is important for social entrepreneurship because it helps students realize they’re not alone in their concerns or in their desire to do something about these concerns.
- Parents: This is a great opportunity for building more informal partnerships through community events centered around kids and youth. This will enable a more holistic perspective on community, while at the same time encouraging kids to be kids.
- Educators: Work together with parents to design a field trip for students so that students can see and interact with helpers. This will also help students to see and understand the commitment involved with putting their plan into action.
Profit.
Profit can be estimated in both tangible and intangible ways. In social entrepreneurship, it’s the combination of these methods of assessment that has the potential to provide the greatest sense of fulfillment because it enables the entrepreneur to see both that their efforts matter and that others see benefit in these efforts.
- Parents: You can encourage children to look at the intangible benefits of their efforts through the language you use to connect about those efforts, through asking questions that center more about the experience than the results, and through praising character and effort more than tangible results. This will help children to keep in mind that they are more than what they do.
- Educators: You can teach children how to measure the effectiveness of methods used to achieve SMART goals through measures of tangible benefits like financial profits, the number of people benefiting, the direct result of efforts on the nature of the problem.
Looking Through a Different Lens
Children must establish a sense of agency, especially in the face of challenges that may seem beyond their ability to do anything about. Partnership between parents and educators facilitates this development and encourages trust. Looking through the lens of social entrepreneurship is a key contributor to this necessary agency.