Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Entrepreneurial education for migrant populations often prioritizes technical-business content and overlooks the experiential, relational and contextual learning embedded in migratory trajectories. This article presents the development and initial content assessment of MELT, Migration-Embedded Learning for Entrepreneurship, a pedagogical framework that translates potentially relevant migration experiences into explicit, critical, assessable and transferable entrepreneurial competencies. MELT does not assume that migration automatically produces entrepreneurial capacity; rather, it argues that experiences of adaptation, decision-making under uncertainty, resource recombination, institutional navigation, network activation and intercultural opportunity recognition can acquire pedagogical value when critically reconstructed within broader structural conditions. Using a convergent mixed design, a multi-stakeholder expert panel of 12 participants with academic, professional and experiential knowledge assessed the model's relevance, conceptual coherence, pedagogical applicability, evaluability, ethical and intercultural sensitivity, institutional feasibility, clarity and usefulness; open-ended responses were analyzed thematically and integrated with the quantitative results to revise the framework. The panel gave a favorable initial assessment, particularly for relevance, coherence, applicability and evaluability, while identifying the need for greater operational concreteness, facilitator training, evaluation rubrics, ethical safeguards, institutional support and non-prescriptive itineraries. The revised model adds a preparatory phase (socio-occupational diagnosis, willingness and suitability) to five pedagogical phases: trajectory mapping, critical reconstruction of learning, competence translation, low-risk situated experimentation, and evaluation and transfer through portfolio. MELT offers a promising pedagogical architecture for inclusive entrepreneurial education with migrants, though future pilot studies should test its feasibility, acceptability, ethical safety and formative effects in real training contexts.
Source: Frontiers in Education
Authors: Teresa Paiva, Esther García-Valverde
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,353
OpenAlex ID: W7224079843