Facilitating a Solution Focused approach in Higher Education through live consulting

Julie-Gregory

Abstract

This paper discusses how creating a temporary learning community using a Solution Focused approach (SF) can effec- tively engage participants from the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) community, with students of business study- ing in Higher Education (HE), while still satisfying the requirements for the latter group’s academic assessment towards a Master’s degree. Policy makers for the last three decades have increasingly introduced measures to support SME’s but business owner managers frequently say they need answers to their business challenges in the context of their ‘life world’ and spurn HE management programmes such as MBA’s. HE institutions cite the SME community as very diffi- cult to engage yet continue to maintain institutional barriers. Some scholars say that efforts are not made in HE to align programmes with owner managers’ needs. Recently entrepre- neurship education has become a burgeoning field of practice and study in HE. Within this field, SF approaches are ideal for engaging both business owners and students within learn- ing communities, and a partial account of a Master’s programme that utilises SF is offered as an illustrative case. SF approaches in this educational context are then discussed as desirable by comparison with the critical literature regard- ing entepreneurship education.

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