Teaching Entrepreneurship Education with Venture Creation Approach for Students with Special Needs

Abstract

This study attempts to identify the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education introduced through entrepreneurship programs to a group of special needs students in SMK Datuk Haji Abdul Wahab in 2019. Entrepreneurship education is all about teachers setting up activities and projects that bring students to produce products and launch business opportunities. To address the employment issues among young adults with special needs, the study takes an action research approach.  It is our aim to help students to create employment opportunities through this concept and enable them to generate a source of income once they graduate secondary school. This big concept is guided by an evidence-based framework called The Venture Creation Approach. The framework helps teachers to understand what are we venturing into and how are we going to create or innovate products. 30 special needs students from SMK Datuk Haji Abdul Wahab are involved actively in this concept idea and they are chosen specifically from the low function category. Under this big umbrella of entrepreneurship concept, 3 projects were introduced in stages. They are the Taugeh Production, Botania Kitchen Soap, and Authoring & Illustrating Children’s Picture Books. In the taugeh project which was started in Sept 2019, we had 30 times of harvesting with 4 seeding bins. As for the kitchen soap project, which was started in January 2020, 82 boxes were sold now. The third project, the children’s picture book which was started in September 2020, we have self-published 4 books and a total of 50 books are being sold. Training the students to be working on the projects independently is our projected outcome in 4 years' time or by the time these students graduate from our program.