Teaching ethnic minority entrepreneurship through parables

Ethnic minority entrepreneurship operates in increasingly complex and ambiguous environments. Thus there is the need for entrepreneurship educators to prepare students to handle ambiguity and to develop a more comprehensive, contextualised and individualised understanding of ethnic minority entrepreneurship. In this paper, we present parables as a pedagogical tool to facilitate an understanding of ethnic minority entrepreneurship through the embracing and tackling of ambiguity by students. This is done through student interviews conducted with immigrant entrepreneurs in Sweden, followed by the construction of parables based on the interviews. The liberatory type of pedagogy where the student is the storyteller highlights multiple layers of meaning, including power, hegemony and exploitation in the interpretation and teaching about ethnic minority entrepreneurship. Such parable pedagogy encourages entrepreneurship educators to give more emphasis to ethnic minority entrepreneurship in the content and design of their curriculum.