Now let’s talk effects. Because if there is anything that motivates work with value creation pedagogy, it is all the strong effects we have been able to see when students and teachers work with value creation. Students gain strengthened motivation, self-confidence, perseverance, initiative and empathy for others. They become kinder to each other, take greater responsibility for their learning and experience school as more meaningful. Many students also learn more and get higher grades. The effects are mainly triggered by interaction with the outside world, value creation for others, teamwork and receiving feedback from outsiders, see Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1 Effects and how they arise in value creation pedagogy (Lackéus 2020).

Teachers also get a better situation. They get safer classes, easier assessment, stronger inclusion through more varied teaching and increased clarity in student learning. They then avoid spending so much time motivating students and dealing with conflicts between students. The teaching profession also becomes more fun.

All this sounds almost too good to be true. So a question that arises is: “How do you know this, Martin?” So let me take it from the beginning.

Ten years of research on value creation pedagogy

I am a kind of backwards researcher. Most researchers start with a theoretical idea, set up a hypothesis and then test whether it holds in practice. I instead started with a vague but extremely strong feeling in my stomach that something worked really well in practice. The question was never whether it worked, but instead what it was that worked, and why. A kind of appreciative inquiry.[1] My life had taken an unexpected turn when at the age of 26 at Chalmers I was thrown into a crazy space rocket full of learning oxygen. For me, the effects were crystal clear, emotional and life-changing. He who has lived on the moon himself does not have to doubt its existence. So that this was an educational effort that worked, I already knew that when I started my research ten years later on what the teachers did with us. But what, of everything I had been through, was it that worked? And why did it work? It would take another ten years to come up with well-grounded answers to these questions.

To get answers, I started by doing interviews. Lots of interviews. I sat and listened for hundreds of hours to students who were now in the same emotional situation as I had been twelve years earlier. They went to the same education that I myself had attended. I asked them in different ways what caused emotional storms in them, and why. Between interviews, I asked them to write down their thoughts each time they experienced a new emotional event on our programme and send the text to me. A kind of emotional survey. My own emotional roller-coaster from the same education told me that it was among the emotions I should look for answers.

The emotions gave the answer to what worked

And quite rightly, it was precisely among all those emotions that I found the answer to the “what” question. The students became most emotionally involved when they got to do something that became valuable to someone external. The pattern was unexpected but very clear. Previously, researchers had thought that it was the start-up of a new venture that caused the strongest effects, much like the concept of Young Enterprise has its focus. But here I found a completely different explanation. In the summer of 2013, I wrote in my first completely own research article that teachers could benefit from exposing their students to value-creating activities.[2] Since then, there have been many different texts on the same theme, some of which have been reviewed and published scientifically.

After finding the answer to what it was that made the strongest difference, I went on to study in more detail what students’ value creation led to for themselves. Such research is called doing an impact study. What effects could we observe when pupils and students learned by creating value for others? When, how and why did the effects occur? Me and my new Chalmers colleague Carin Sävetun spent seven years studying these questions. The first sub-study began in 2013 and the fifth and final one ended in 2017. Then it took a few years to analyze all the empirical material as well. Carin managed to change jobs and is today the CEO of the small IT company we needed to start to build our most important tool for data collection, an app for emotion surveys that we named Loopme. During the trip, we received help from director of education Ragnar Åsbrink at the National Agency for Education, who was very interested in our research. The research article summarizing our conclusions from 291 interviews and 10,953 emotional questionnaire responses from 1,048 participants in 35 different schools was published in 2020.[3]

From 3,500 to twenty-five pages in two years

The conclusions were so unexpected and different from previous research that the scientific review of the article took two years and involved eight researchers around the world. We got to know the names of two of them, the rest were doubly anonymous. They did not know who we were and we did not know who they were, other than that several of them were very prominent. Our dialogue had to take place in writing and eventually filled about sixty pages of text. With such controversial conclusions, the expert reviewers were extra careful. Therefore, the months passed and became years. The article also got better and better for each duel. A key question was how the extensive data we collected and which proved the effects would be presented so it became both credible and understandable. How to summarize 3,500 pages of interview text and 10,953 questionnaire responses on twenty-five meager pages? We scratched our heads for a long time about this.

Finally, the Danish professor Helle Neergaard gave us crucial advice. She suggested that we do what she called mega-tables with both the effects and many illustrative quotes from students in one and the same table. In this way, we were able to let our collected data speak for us, and convince the experts that the effects we described were not free fantasies. For me, this became an emotional moment of deep insight and learning. Helle solved our communicative dilemma in an elegant way. Without that advice, we might not even have had our overall results published. That’s why I also remember exactly where I sat when I received the advice. Where, do you think? Yes, in Madrid of course. Another Spanish bocadillo moment.

The final article contains two different mega-tables that describe the effects we saw. The article can be downloaded for free thanks to Chalmers buying it free from download fees.[4] Search for “comparing impact Lackéus” and you will find it easily.

Effects on students

Let me now briefly summarize what one of the mega-tables says about the effects of value creation pedagogy, see Table 2.2 below.

Table 2.2 Effects of value creation pedagogy (Lackéus 2020, p.951).

Interaction with the outside world has strong effects on students. Their self-confidence is strengthened when they notice that they receive a more positive response than they had expected. Their ability to take initiative is strengthened when they discover that the outside world is not waiting for or cares about the one who does nothing. They must act here and now to get their coveted feedback from outsiders. Their communicative ability is strengthened when they feel the pressure to make a good impression and get their message across.

The very act of creating value for others usually results in extremely strong motivation. It is perceived as fun, exciting, meaningful and rewarding. If the value creation is based on knowledge, the students’ knowledge development is also strengthened. Knowledge then becomes an indispensable means of achieving the goal of creating value for others. Speaking of confusion between goals and means (see Chapter 1), we see the opposite here compared to the teachers’ situation. Over time, we also often see identity changes. Many students increasingly define themselves as such a person who creates value for others. They do not express it with those words, but the meaning revolves around empathy and joy of being able to do something meaningful with and for others.

Being able to work in teams differs here from more traditional group work where tasks are often divided up and performed mainly individually or in small groups within the group. With an outside recipient of value, it becomes more like teamwork for real, and students benefit more from each other’s different skills, strengths and interests. This in turn leads to them learning new things about themselves. They compare their own strengths, weaknesses, priorities and values ​​with others in the team.

Applying theories and knowledge in practical value creation for others strengthens the development of knowledge. A deeper understanding is developed and students remember better what they have learned. It may sound obvious, but such a bridge between theory and practice occurs more naturally in value-creating processes than otherwise.[5]

With outside recipients of value as an unpredictable joker in the game, the learning processes become more uncertain than before. It is not possible to know in advance how an outsider will perceive and react to the students’ attempts to create value. It develops students’ courage and perseverance. Because when they dare and succeed, many students usually say that this was actually not as dangerous as they first thought. The outcome does not always turn out as planned, but then they try again and discover that perseverance pays off. Just like I gradually learned to order a sandwich in Madrid.

When students finally get that much-coveted feedback from outsiders, it leads to a powerful increase in motivation. This is probably the biggest source of motivation in the whole process. Therefore, outsiders’ feedback on the value created (or not) is absolutely crucial. Perhaps here we have the cleanest rocket fuel of all for students’ learning. Self-confidence also tends to skyrocket when students succeed in creating something of value, and it is again the feedback that is the proof that they have succeeded. Students often mention in particular that they see feedback from others as clear proof that they have succeeded. It’s almost like a trophy crowning success.

Negative feedback also provides motivation and learning

Negative feedback and criticism can also strengthen students’ motivation and learning, because then the students feel that they have influenced others and made a difference. Dismissive feedback can also give them energy to try again. A well-documented example is from 2016 when two students at Edboskolan in Huddinge wrote a blog post about how they saw value creation pedagogy as a new era for the school (Sandén and Jonsson 2016). The post was heavily criticized by principals and teachers on Twitter. Many insinuated that the students had been indoctrinated. The teacher Maria Wiman (2019, p.147-148) describes in her book on value creation pedagogy how the criticism was received by the students:

“The students were appalled and upset, absolutely! But above all, it was exciting! […] When I look back on what happened, there is no doubt that the students came out of this strengthened. They stood up for their cause and for each other.”

The students themselves expressed that the event strengthened their motivation, perseverance, communicative ability, initiative and knowledge of online hate. They also wrote more texts about what society can learn from the fact that some adults are not able to cope with competent students who contribute. The student Ludwig Berglind wrote in a debate post in the local newspaper:[6]

“Maybe you are someone who thinks that children are stupid? […] We are not stupid. We are the future. Children make a difference.”

I am not at all surprised by the powerful and continued learning from an initially unsuccessful attempt to create value for others. We see the same effect every year among our students at Chalmers. In a recent thesis I supervised, two of my students explored what people learn from negative events.[7] They interviewed sixteen of our alumni about their most emotional failures while they were students with us, and asked what they had brought with them in life. It was a nice illustration of how incredibly much we learn from failures and difficulties, see figure 2.2. We learn the most about ourselves and our team. But we also learn about problem solving, communication, value creation, social skills and being entrepreneurial. I think Jarvis is probably right that harmony is a non-learning situation. In any case, there will not be nearly as strong learning in a purely harmonious classroom alone. If we want to get knowledge and abilities to be burned into the students’ brains for life, we should thus strive for emotional highs and lows. A good way to succeed in this is value creation pedagogy.

Figure 2.2 Common types of learning from failures (Blomé and Simson 2021).

Factors that affect the strength of the effects

If we now for a while again see value creation pedagogy as the accelerator in a kind of educational electric car, it would be good if we could adjust the speed a little. When practicing driving in a parking lot, it may be directly inappropriate to push the accelerator pedal into the carpet. In our research, we have seen seven factors that affect how strong the effects will be on the students, but also how challenging it will be for the teacher. For those who want maximum speed, the seven factors can be used to increase speed. For those who want to try on a small scale, some factors can be adapted in the other direction. The seven factors are shown in Figure 2.4 and are now briefly described.

Figure 2.4 Progression model with seven factors that affect the strength of the effects of value creation pedagogy (Lackéus and Sävetun 2016).

Kind of value. The kind of value that has the strongest effect on students has proven to be influencel value. Many students love to be able to influence other people in depth. If you want a soft start, you can instead focus on creating enjoyment value and social value. Economic value creation can work well, but is associated with some challenges. Managing money in school can be complicated. It can also be perceived as a bit too capitalist and self-centered. An alternative is to raise money for charity, read more about it in Chapter 5.

Recipient. Varying the type of recipient of value is one of the most important ways to control the degree of complexity and impact. Staying within the school’s safe confines is easier for teachers and can be a good start, but does not have as strong effects on students.

Feedback. The type of feedback from outsiders affects how committed the students become. The strongest effect is when the students feel and get proof that they have made a big concrete difference for many people. At the same time, it is also the most difficult level to reach in practical terms.

Magnitude. Small projects in small groups are easy to manage. However, we see the strongest effects when value creation takes place in large projects in the whole class. Then the students usually need to be divided into different groups based on different competences and tasks, just like in working life.

Time span. The longer a value-creating activity lasts, the stronger the effects on the students often become. Here, calendar time is more important than the number of hours in the classroom. The projects with the strongest effect on students have often lasted for a year.

Planning. Thoughtful planning increases the time required for teachers, but has stronger effects on students. However, good planning does not have to involve a large scale. A metaphor many teachers find useful is to see value creation pedagogy as a drop of colour you pour into a glass of water. The value-creating element is small but recurring, and then colours all teaching with a sense of meaning that strengthens students’ learning.

IT support. Sophisticated pedagogical forms of work require sophisticated methods and tools that support teachers. IT support can be used to handle the complexity of learning for assessment, follow-up and dialogue.[8] We return to this in Chapter 8 on assessment as jazz. IT support can also be used in students’ interactions with outsiders. It can be through blogs, social media, video conferencing, programming or other digital solutions. An interesting digital platform used in Sweden to publish students’ texts is Mobile Stories, and can be said to be the contemporary equivalent of the French educational philosopher Freinet’s printing press.[9]

Why do the effects occur?

Now let’s take an overall perspective for a moment. How can we understand the altruistic paradox that students seem to be more motivated to create value for others in ten minutes than for themselves in ten years?[10] At the risk of making phlogiston-like claims, I will nevertheless attempt a more comprehensive explanation here. I think there is a perspective – meaningful action – that can help us understand both how the school works today and how it could work better with more widespread value creation activities among students. Everything boils down to a kind of axiom, a general and universal consideration by philosophers Ludwig von Mises and Michael Oakeshott. They wrote independently that all human actions are always meaningful from the individual’s perspective.[11] Applied to school, students thus have meaningful reasons to deviate from school, based on their own narrow perspectives. They probably see the school as meaningless. It could be the whole purpose they experience as meaningless – to learn things they see no use for in their lives as they live here and now.

When we then add a purpose for the school that is so different as to create value for others, it has a great impact. On the one hand, there is of course a risk of purpose competition. Should we no longer focus on learning in school? But it also opens up completely new possibilities. With a new purpose available, teachers can better reach those students for whom the existing purpose does not work. A new basic purpose starts a long chain reaction in us humans. It triggers deep emotions, it affects what meaning we see with what we do and thus basically what learning is possible.[12] Instead of saying that the two purposes compete with each other, we can see them as complementary. One purpose captures the present and the other purpose captures the future.

When we appeal to truant students to return to school, we often do so today by appealing to their hedonistic and selfish side – come back so you can enjoy the good life and avoid a lot of suffering as you get older. Value creation gives us access to a completely different and more prosocial strategy – come back and be part of a warm community where we make a difference for others for real, here and now.

The effects we see cannot be understood incrementally. One plus one purpose here is far more than two. We may need to use chemical rather than mechanistic explanatory models to understand why we see the effects we see.[13] Value creation pedagogy seems to be a bit of a catalyst for school. The purpose of learning and the purpose of value creation reinforce each other. When the coloured value-creation drop hits the water surface of learning, a violent chemical reaction takes place that I honestly can not really explain the power of. What exactly is the equivalent of the piece of ceramic or metal found in a petrol car’s catalyst for exhaust gas purification?

Maybe it’s the effects of a mental time travel we see. When students’ learning becomes valuable for others here and now, and thus also for themselves, their future is connected with their present in their heads. In the film Back to the Future, lightning strikes, slams and burns the tires just at the crucial moment when Doc’s sports car converted to a time machine reaches a speed of 88 miles per hour and the time window opens. Maybe the power of value creation pedagogy comes from giving students a glimpse of their own future? Is that perhaps why study counsellors like this way of working so much?

Effects for teachers

Now we return to teachers’ everyday lives. Teachers who provide value-creating tasks to their students can also do better themselves. It’s like the saying goes: doing well by doing good. In our effect studies, many teachers have told us and written to us about exactly this. It is fun for teachers when students think school is fun and meaningful, especially if it does not happen at the cost of learning but instead strengthens learning. Then teachers’ everyday lives also become more meaningful. Many teachers think it’s nice not to have to answer the question “Why do we do this?” as often. Teachers also get more chances to assess students when more creations are made that can be assessed. In addition, the assessment becomes more inclusive when more students can show what they are capable of.

Teachers have also said that they like the increased clarity, structure and guidelines compared to other student-oriented pedagogical approaches that are often perceived as fuzzy and difficult to assess. A teacher wrote to us that value creation is a kind of middle ground between a more traditional teacher-centered teaching and student-centered but fuzzy teaching:

“It feels like value creation ends up in the middle between these two educational philosophies and specifies relatively well how I want my teaching role to develop. It uses the best of both worlds and strives to make students both involved and engaged, but at the same time contains tools for teachers to help students.”

A kind of music guiding teachers ‘and students’ movements

The quote above about combining two worlds captures something important with value creation pedagogy. Teachers can get help with pedagogical variation – an important but often difficult balancing act between widely differing learning philosophies. Teaching with well-balanced variation becomes more inclusive, as different students have different needs. On the front of my dissertation, I drew a figure that illustrates just this, see figure 2.5.

Figure 2.5 Value creation pedagogy as a kind of music that facilitates teachers ‘and students’ coordinated movements across the philosophical playing field of education (Lackéus, 2016, p.69).

The reclining eight in the figure illustrates a coordinated movement over the entire philosophical playing field of education. The notes are an attempt to capture that value creation pedagogy can be seen as a kind of music that teachers and students can dance to, so that they can more easily move together in a movement pattern otherwise very difficult to coordinate. Maybe it’s jazz music they dance to, see more in chapter 8.

The work begins at the bottom center of the figure with the question “For whom is this knowledge valuable today?”. Then there is a movement diagonally upwards to the left towards traditional education where knowledge is obtained through lectures, books and own work. Then the journey continues to the right towards progressive education, with students who, based on their knowledge, can try to create something of value in creative group exercises in the classroom. In the next step, students leave the classroom, either physically or digitally, and begin searching for one or more perceived outside recipients of value to their creations. Here it gets really emotional. Students make one or more attempts to really create the intended value. Then they return to the classroom and ask themselves “For whom was this knowledge valuable today?”. After reflecting and reconnecting to the knowledge material, the students take a new turn with new material, and then another.

School in good balance between theory and practice

The reclining eight in the figure shows how the value-creating process gives teachers support in issues such as when it is time for teacher-led lectures and student exercises, when creative creation should take over, when students should leave the classroom and try their wings, under their own responsibility but with a crystal clear purpose, and when it’s time to gather for reflective learning in the classroom. These widely differing approaches are also better linked together through a clear process with an engaging and concrete purpose.

When teachers and students then move in a more coordinated way across the philosophical playing field of education, they also get a better balance in everyday life between widely differing perspectives. Instead of us adults digging into the usual trenches of traditional versus progressive education, our students get a school day with a good balance between theoretical knowledge and practical application, between deep learning and emotional engagement.

Journalists who dig… trenches

Once I wrote a debate article about the balancing effect of value creation pedagogy on schools and the need for a more balanced school policy.^[14] I wrote that a strong focus on student discipline but no focus on student motivation can hurt those students who are particularly dependent on intrinsic motivation. Especially then newly arrived refugees, students in socially disadvantaged areas, students with diagnoses and boys. I spiced it up with many references, because I am far from alone in having seen challenges with a lack of school motivation among certain vulnerable student groups.[15]

The article was included in a reputable daily newspaper, but I received much resistance. Promoting a balanced school turned out to be unexpectedly controversial. Maybe it was because the editor chose a rather unbalanced headline: “High demands and discipline in school risk pushing young people to gangs”. Click-friendly by all means, but that was not quite what I meant. My text was rather about the lack of things that complement and balance the prevailing discipline focus in debate, politics and classroom practice.

After publication, someone wondered if I was against high demands and discipline. But I’m not at all against it. The process in the figure above requires both high demands on students and self-discipline enough to stick to a challenging goal. I myself certainly know the value of struggling with vocabulary. Because without knowledge of words, I would never have been able to create value for all the exciting Spaniards I met in Madrid. But the reverse is also true. Had there been no exciting Spaniards in Spain, I would never have been able to become fluent in Spanish. It required deep study almost every night, and it was the value of joy and social value that filled Carlos’ reading room in Argüelles with learning oxygen. The school debate should therefore not be about duty versus joy. What we need in school is duty and joy. Two thoughts in the head at the same time.

An emotional lesson this time was that a balanced school is not a particularly click-friendly point to make. Investigative journalists that dig up new scoops are good, but I do not like when they dig trenches in the school debate.

References

Berglind, L. (2016). Ludwig’s answer to the critics: Maybe you are the ones who think that children are stupid in their heads?

Blomé, A., & Simson, W. (2021). Entrepreneurial Failure and Learning – The role of affect in learning from failure and its impact on nascent entrepreneurs Master thesis, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg.

Callahan, G. (2005). Oakeshott and Mises on Understanding Human Action. The Independent Review, 10(2), 231-248.

Carlin, M., & Clendenin, N. (2019). Celestin Freinet’s printing press: Lessons of a ‘bourgeois’ educator. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(6), 628-639.

Cooperrider, DL, Whitney, D., & Stavros, JM (2008). Appreciative inquiry handbook: For leaders of change. San Francisco, CA: Crown Custom Publishing Inc.

Ekholm, D. (2018). Youth exclusion in vulnerable neighborhoods: An overview of knowledge about social exclusion in relation to economic conditions, education, political participation and spatial segregation. In: R&D Center for care, nursing and social work.

Hugo, M. (2012). When school learning is meaningless. In L. Mathiasson (Ed.), Assignment Teacher: An anthology on status, professionalism and future dreams Stockholm: Lärarförbundets förlag. pp. 31-38.

Lackéus, M. (2013). Developing Entrepreneurial Competencies – An Action-Based Approach and Classification in Education.  Licentiate Thesis, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg. (ISSN: 1654-9732)

Lackéus, M. (2014). An emotion based approach to assessing entrepreneurial education. International Journal of Management Education, 12(3), 374-396.

Lackéus, M. (2016). Value creation as educational practice – towards a new educational philosophy grounded in entrepreneurship?  Doctoral thesis, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. (ISBN 978-91-7597-387-6)

Lackéus, M. (2019). Requirements and discipline in school risk driving young people to gangs. Dagens Nyheter Debate 28/9. Downloaded 2020-10-23 from: https://www.dn.se/debatt/krav-och-disciplin-i-skolan-riskerar-driva-unga-till-gang/.

Lackéus, M. (2020). Comparing the impact of three different experiential approaches to entrepreneurship in education. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 26(5), 937-971.

Lackéus, M., Lundqvist, M., & Williams Middleton, K. (2016). Bridging the traditional – progressive education rift through entrepreneurship. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 22(6), 777-803.

Lackéus, M., & Sävetun, C. (2016). Entrepreneurial education as value creation pedagogy – a third way? An effect study of value creation pedagogy on behalf of the National Agency for Education. Gothenburg: Chalmers University of Technology

Nowacki, MR, & Eecke, W. (2003). The Superiority of ‘Chemical Thinking’for Understanding Free Human Society According to Hegel. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 988(1), 313-321.

Oakeshott, M. (1991). On human conduct. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sandén, I., & Jonsson, I. (2016). I now know how to make a difference!

von Mises, L. (1949). Human action: A treatise on economics. Auburn, Alabama: The Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Wiman, M. (2019). Value creation pedagogy. Stockholm: Lärarförlaget.

Åhslund, I. (2019). Perceptions, expectations and didactic choices – a study of the importance of teaching for boys’ school performance.  Licentiate thesis, Mid Sweden University,

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[1] Appreciative research is called appreciative inquiry in English and is a leadership theory based on the thesis of studying and expanding what works well, instead of studying what is problematic, see Cooperrider, Whitney and Stavros (2008).

[2] See Lackéus (2014, p.391). See also Lackéus, Lundqvist and Williams Middleton (2016).

[3] See Lacquer (2020).

[4] See Lacquer (2020).

[5] Read about such bridging in Lackéus, Lundqvist andWilliams Middleton (2016).

[6] See Berglind (2016).

[7] See Blomé och Simson (2021).

[8] See Lackéus och Sävetun (2021).

[9] See www.mobilestories.se. Read about Freinet in Carlin och Clendenin (2019).

[10] I have in both my dissertations described value creation pedagogy as an altruistic paradox, se Lackéus (2013, 2016).

[11] See von Mises (1949, s.26) and Oakeshott (1991, s.37). See also Callahan (2005, s.233).

[12] I’ve written about this in Lackéus (2020, s.958).

[13] See Nowacki och Eecke (2003).

[14] See Lackéus (2019).

[15] See for example Hugo (2012), Åhslund (2019) and Ekholm (2018).

In this chapter, I take a more detailed look at what value creation pedagogy is. Word by word, I go through key details and perspectives. It will be a bit of word-twisting, because if our words are limited, the world we live in will also be limited.[1]

I’m not the first to focus on students’ value creation for others in education. Medieval apprentices and Freinet’s pedagogy of work were far ahead. Several of my contemporary research colleagues have also touched upon the idea before.[2] But perhaps value creation pedagogy is the most specific semantics that has been proposed. I often think that the accelerator pedal we today call value creation pedagogy has always been there. With a whole host of pedals for teachers to choose from, however, too few feet have hit the exact pedal this book is about. A more specific semantics puts the headlight on a rarely used accelerator pedal that has been shown to make the educational car rush forward like a newly charged electric car. There are of course many more nice accelerator pedals – other educational ideas that give different desirable effects, but you can read about them in other books.

The meaning-seeking student

Research certainly takes time. After four years of work, we had come up with four words – learning by creating value. I wrote about this in my licentiate thesis in 2013.[3] But what happened then was that many people misunderstood us. They believed that we meant that students would learn by creating value for themselves. Which all teachers already work with every day. So we had to spend two more years researching two more words – for others. I wrote about these two words in my doctoral dissertation, which was completed at the end of 2015, and in a research article published in 2017.[4] Focusing on “the other” creates a deep sense of meaning in us humans. Meaning-seeking is in fact one of humans’ strongest driving forces.[5] A telling example is the so-called parental paradox. Why do so many want to have children when it is so obviously hard and stressful? Well, because it increases the sense of meaning in life.[6] Own happiness and meaningfulness with others are two different phenomena, for both parents and students.[7] Value creation pedagogy can thus be a way to reach unmotivated students tired of school – perhaps it is the lack of meaning they are tired of?

Six words in six years

I do not know how time efficient we were when it took six years to research a new combination of six everyday words. But the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had probably been pleased. He loved linguistic issues and emphasized the importance of broadening our views with the help of everyday language. In my research, I have been able to clearly see how these six words broaden the views of many teachers.

When I try to trace in retrospect how it was possible to expand with two such short words that change so much, it is difficult to find the exact time in the mailbox. However, my published research articles provide clues. Words that are published can never be changed afterwards, so it’s a bit like searching among frozen thoughts. The first place we wrote about the phrase learning-through-creating-value-for-others was in an article from 2016. I and my supervisors then wrote about how students’ value creation contributes to bridging the classic gap between traditional and progressive education.[8] Traditional education often means teacher-centered lectures for passive students, solitary student work in silence and exams. Progressive education is instead said to be about student-centered, interest-based and active learning, often in groups.[9]

Our 2016 article was also a way to promote a better balance in schools between sharply differing perspectives, rather than further contributing to the trench warfare between traditional “chalk and talk” teaching and progressive “loosey-goosey” pedagogy. In the article, we call value creation pedagogy an educational philosophy. Even today, I do not know if I should call it an educational philosophy, a method, an approach or a way of working. Students’ value creation can express itself in so many different ways. Here in the book, I opted for calling it a way of working.

A longer definition of 31 words

There is also a longer definition of value creation pedagogy:[10]

Let students learn by applying their existing and future competencies in attempts to create something, preferably novel, of value to at least one external stakeholder outside their group, class or school.

However, these words did not take 31 years to arrive at, but they came about already in the summer of 2015 when I gradually started writing my doctoral dissertation. The definition is described in more detail in Table 1.1. The rest of this chapter gives a detailed description and discussion of each phrase.

Longer definition	Explanation
Let students learn	The main purpose is learning, although students often perceive it as the purpose being to create value for others.
by applying their existing and future	Students may apply competencies they already possess and those they are now learning for the first time.
competencies	The exercise aims to develop both knowledge and skills as well as attitudes. A summary word for all this is competencies.
in attempts	It is the attempt that counts. If no value for others is created, learning can still occur. Students learn a lot from failing.
to create	This is a creative exercise. Students are expected to create something that did not exist before.
something,	the result is some kind of human creation (artifact). A physical (can be touched), intellectual (ideological) or cultural (social) creation.
preferably novel,	That it is new is not a requirement but is desirable. From new for the student to new for the world. The more novel creation, the more emotional process.
of value	It should be possible evaluate the creation – hopefully the creation then also turns out to be valuable
to at least one	At least one external stakeholder needs to be able to give feedback about the value that was created or not for him / her / it (can also be animals / plants).
external stakeholder	The more external the recipient of value, the more powerful the exercise becomes, but also the more frightening and complex.
outside their group,	A first step is to let students do something valuable for other students in the class.
class	The next step is stakeholders outside the class but within their own school, within the safe boundaries of the school.
or school.	The most powerful step is to involve stakeholders outside the school. But also the most frightening and complex.

Table 1.1 Detailed definition of value creation pedagogy.

Let students learn…

Value-creating activities are a means of strengthening the end goal of student learning. It is by letting students create value for others that we better achieve the goal of deepening students’ learning. However, the difference between means and ends can cause confusion.[11] Some teachers ask me what would happen to the school’s core mission if students are allowed to focus on creating value for others. I think the question is reasonable given the steady stream of pedagogical trends and ideas we have seen over the years that often disturb teachers’ focus on the core mission. Do we really get more learning by spending a little less time learning? I understand if this can feel a bit backwards at first glance. Who believes that we get to our destination faster by leaving the motorway and instead taking a smaller road? How many vocabulary tests should now be replaced with eating mold cheese?

What we have seen is that something that may initially feel like a detour here becomes an exciting shortcut. By devoting say 3-5 percent of the time to strengthening students’ sense of context and meaning, we get much more effect from the 95-97 percent of the time that still focuses on learning. It becomes like a leverage effect, see figure 1.1. The teacher succeeds better with the help of the skewer. A small stone (value-creating activities) helps moveing the many times larger stone (students’ learning). If the students for a while get to feel that the goal is to create value for others, they will be strengthened in their learning of knowledge and skills from the curriculum. Means and ends do not even have to be part of the same process. A value creation process in language class can spill over and have a positive effect on students’ involvement in completely different school subjects. A bit like a butterfly effect of learning.

Figure 1.1 Students’ value creation for others as a lever for strengthened learning.

… by applying their existing and future …

Learning is strengthened when knowledge is used in the real world. That’s how theory and practice are mixed. The focus can definitely be on topics that are currently being treated in a specific subject. At the same time, previously acquired knowledge and skills play an equally important role. In-depth and meaningful learning is often based on newly acquired knowledge being integrated with what the student already knows.[12] Such reinforcement of meaningfulness then helps in retaining knowledge in long-term memory.[13] For me, for example, the Spanish word bocadillo has stuck in my head forever. I can still clearly see in front of me that sandwich stand in Madrid where I tried to apply my theoretical knowledge practically.

The value of linking theory to practice may be obvious for many teachers, but how do we make it happen in practice? Here, value creation pedagogy can help teachers. Students get support in integrating new and old knowledge and skills, simply because everything is mixed naturally in “real” situations. The multifaceted reality seldom respects the strict separation and sequencing of the curriculum in different subjects and learning objectives.

… competencies…

Knowledge, skills, attitudes, feelings, beliefs, values ​​and physical movement patterns are sometimes simplified into a single word – competencies. This word represents a very broad view of what learning can be. For me, the word competencies has therefore come to represent a higher level of learning. A key advantage of value-creating activities is that students’ learning is broadened to include the entire creation we humans constitute. Body as well as soul. We are now touching upon an important point, so let me explain what I mean in more detail.

Early in my research career, I fell head over heels for researcher Peter Jarvis’ theories on human learning.[14] He wrote, like few others, about the crucial role of emotions in learning, that it is the whole body with its network of hundreds of billions of empathetic nerves that learns. Not just the cerebral cortex. For me, who had experienced a kind of learning-by-burning that ended abruptly in a plush sofa, Jarvis’ theories felt right on target.

We tend to like when our students are happy and harmonious. But according to Jarvis, harmony is a situation of non-learning. What is needed for us humans to learn in-depth are emotionally strong experiences marked by dissonance, perhaps confusion, perhaps even a bit of magic. This is illustrated by Jarvis with a few different figures on learning, summarized in Figure 1.2 below. If we want to achieve deep learning, we need to leave the calm but boring harmony of the straight line and dare to enter the dissonance bubble where students have to stretch a little bit outside their comfort zone.

But how can teachers make students experience emotionally strong experiences without throwing everyone involved into impossible complexity, assessment splits and painful uncertainty? Here I see value creation pedagogy as a functional and practically feasible way to achieve Jarvis’ vision of such powerful whole-person learning. If we succeed, students develop complex skills, not “just” isolated knowledge, skills or attitudes. Now, the word competencies is a strongly simplified word for what students can be expected to learn from value creation pedagogy, but it is in any case more versatile than talking about “just” knowledge, skills or abilities. I want you to think about all this when you see the word competencies in this book in the future.

Figure 1.2 Dissonance-based learning. Inspired by Jarvis (2006, pp.20-23).

… in attempts …

As is well known, reasonably difficult tasks are preferable.[15] But what is reasonably difficult when it comes to trying to create something valuable for others? At first glance, this may seem very difficult, perhaps even impossible. Many teachers who have asked their students to create value for others have also told about the initial confusion a task of creating value for others can cause among students. Therefore, it is important to clarify that it is the attempt that is important. It can even be said that many students probably learn the most from their failed attempts to create value for others. However, this is not to say that teachers should maximize the level of difficulty, or that it would be good for students to never succeed.

Challenges need to be given in appropriate doses and gradually increased. Then we hit the narrow corridor called “flow” where we balance on the fine line between anxiety and boredom.[16] The challenges we face are then in balance with our own ability. For my own part, I ended up in six months of flow when I went to an English-speaking real estate agent in Madrid. He gave me a room with a talkative and charming gentleman in Argüelles named Juan Carlos who then woke me up every morning for almost six months with a happy “¡Hola Martin! Qué tal?”. My anxiety about becoming homeless decreased, but I never got bored. I learned fluent Spanish in one semester and at the same time got to create some economic (room rent) and social value (good company) together with Carlos.

Some confusion should not deter you as a teacher, even when students are worried, protesting or demanding more clarity. Instead, we can use the confusion as a lever for enhanced learning. Students are forced to stop, think, turn and turn things around and finally move on. Then with revised mental models and deep learning as a result. But the confusion can be of the “right” kind. Researchers often talk about productive and unproductive confusion.[17]

I myself try to strive to be clear about what is to be done (create something of value for someone else), why we do this (because it strengthens our own learning), how it should be done in practice (yes, that’s what this book is about), but not say much about how it will go for the students. It’s up to them. And they need time. Not necessarily lesson time but calendar time. Give them a week to think about it.

However, teachers need to be prepared to support students when they experience different types of negative emotions such as dissonance, headaches between expectations and outcomes, feelings of impossibility, worry or anxiety, fear of failure, misunderstanding, frustration and much more. At the same time, it is precisely these difficult-to-digest emotions that build the basis for the euphoria and arousal a successful attempt to create value for outsiders can result in. Just as in a roller coaster, it is not possible to imagine peaks without the occasional deep valley. When we leave the straight line in school without much emotion bubble and instead sometimes go into the carousel of dissonance, we have to deal with both positive and negative emotions among students, and also among teachers. In fact, this is precisely why the effects on students’ learning become so strong. It’s the emotions that do the trick.

… to create something…

We humans have always loved to create things. The evolutionary history of our species provides many examples of this. Mastering fire, creating practical stone tools, creative use of red ocher paint in various rites and cave paintings, development of linguistic symbols for communication and myth-making, construction of various floating fabrics and not least new methods of using the earth.[18] The author Lasse Berg writes about homo habilis, also called handy man, who already several million years ago had a unique handiness in creating things.

Handiness is one of three timeless and uniquely human strengths our species possesses that can help explain the power of value creation pedagogy. Two other uniquely human strengths are social ability towards others and creativity in relation to different challenges and opportunities. Sure, there are animals that possess handiness, social ability and creativity, but no other species on earth possesses and uses these three abilities to the same extent as humans. This has given us enormous benefits over millions of years, and largely explains why our species has become so dominant on earth. Berg writes that these abilities have made us invincible.^[19] What if we could take advantage of them a little more often at school to make students join us? This is exactly what value creation pedagogy can contribute with.

Figure 1.3 below shows the three strengths in relation to value creation pedagogy. The space shuttle in the figure is on its way to high student motivation for school work. It is powered by three launchers filled with three different types of liquid learning oxygen. We can call it handiness oxygen, socializing oxygen and creativity oxygen.

Figure 1.3 Space shuttle on its way to increased student motivation for school work. The shuttle has three launchers filled with three different types of liquid learning oxygen. The figure shows the students in the driver’s seat, a place we adults should give them when we can. Teachers can instead coordinate the space shuttle’s journey across the sky of learning from a control center on the ground.

Letting students create things gives our space shuttle power from one of the three launchers. Students usually enjoy creating things, just as most people do.[20] It can be drawings, reports, posters or brochures. It can be digital creations such as websites, blog posts, videos, podcasts or games. It can be social creations such as campaigns, sketches, sporting events, performances and games. Allowing students to work with concrete creations can deepen learning in an extremely powerful way, and is a central piece of the puzzle in many different socio-cultural learning theories in the spirit of Vygotsky.[21] Through their own creations, students understand the knowledge material better.

Isolated creation, however, is seldom enough all the way forward. If the purpose of the creations is vague, or if no one cares about the students’ creations, well then the space shuttle still risks crashing into flume and indifference. Therefore, the large launcher with socializing oxygen in the middle is needed, which we will get to very soon. But before we get to the space shuttle’s main launcher, we’ll take a closer look at the bottom launcher that is filled with creativity oxygen.

… preferably novel…

Creating something new that becomes useful to others is often called working creatively.[22] Now that the school according to the curriculum is to stimulate students’ creativity, it is fortunate that there are aesthetic subjects. There, students get to create new things in, for example, music, carving, drawing and sewing. Some of the students’ creations also benefit others, which is required for it to be called creativity in the full sense of the word. I have met many craft teachers, art teachers and music teachers who say that value creation pedagogy comes naturally to them. This is how they have always worked with their students, they say. Great.

But the school still needs to do more. Creativity is one of the most important and most in-demand skills in our society.^[23] Routine occupations are increasingly disappearing and are being replaced by occupations that require the ability to think anew, deal with new situations, identify new problems and create new solutions that help others. Creativity is also an important source of meaning in the lives of many people.[24] All teachers therefore need to participate in the work of stimulating students’ creativity, not just the aesthetics teachers. Many aesthetics teachers can also do more to make students’ creations more valuable to others.

Creativity in school is admittedly difficult.[25] Many of the school’s cornerstones hamper students’ creativity, such as clear routines, focus on predictability, detailed curricula for what is to be taught, focus on not making mistakes, assessment in relation to what is right, focus on results, individual work, competition, grades and much more.[26] Some even say that knowledge and creativity are in fundamental conflict with each other.[27]

To make creativity manageable in school, it is therefore often simplified into a focus on coming up with new ideas.[28] It is of course beautiful with intuition and imagination as a basis for thinking anew.[29] But it takes more than that to develop genuine creative ability. Students need to be able to put their ideas into action in practice, preferably in authentic social environments. Students also need to try to get the new creation to be of use and joy to someone else, preferably people outside the school. There are thus four perspectives to keep track of, see figure 1.4 below. Here, value creation pedagogy can facilitate teachers’ work with creativity in practice. When students are allowed to work to create value, they naturally get to experience all four central perspectives on creativity. Students who are allowed to take action and try to create new value for others then develop their creative ability. The value that is created can be new to themselves (everyday creativity), new to the whole world (genius creativity), or something in between.[30] But what exactly is value? We’ll get to that now.

Figure 1.4 Guide to what is required to promote students’ creativity.

… of value …

What does the word value really mean? I was asked that question one day in early November 2015 when the world-famous professor Saras Sarasvathy was at Chalmers in Gothenburg to oppose my dissertation one last time before it was to be printed. Life as a doctoral student is seldom glamorous, but sometimes it shines. It was a magical moment when she examined the idea of ​​value creation pedagogy. She really liked the subject and said that if John Dewey was alive today, he would probably have been a professor of entrepreneurial pedagogy. But she also saw something no other reviewer had seen before. I had completely forgotten to write about different meanings of the word value in my dissertation on value creation pedagogy. Embarrassing!

The ensuing Christmas did not turn out quite as usual. Instead, I found myself buried in all literature of the world about this partially ungoogleable word in five letters. I learned that value as a concept has been studied for hundreds of years by economists, mathematicians, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and many others. The word got its own chapter in my dissertation, and I have continued to read and write a lot about value ever since. For the interested reader, there are many in-depth texts.^[31] However, such in-depth study can fill an entire book, an entire life even. Therefore, this will be a very short summary of the word’s intended meaning.

The word value can be said to have one, two, three, five, ten, seventeen or more meanings, depending on the context and who you are asking. When the word is given one meaning, it is often economic value that is meant. “What is the product worth?” the buyer wonders and then thinks of the price in monetary terms. Many economists like to see the market price of a phenomenon as its true value, and then mathematically calculate supply and demand. Sociologists instead divide value into two meanings by distinguishing between value and values. They let economists handle value in the singular and study many different types of values ​​in the plural. Within sustainable development, three meanings are often discussed – economic, social and ecological value. With a three-phronged income statement in their annual accounts, organizations can show how the year turned out from three different value perspectives – so-called triple bottom line accounting.

In the book I will use a division of value into five meanings which I briefly go through below and which I first wrote about in my dissertation. I also distinguish between value for oneself versus value for others, because the five values ​​can be created either for oneself or for others. It gives us a total of ten meanings, where the classic perspective economic value for oneself accounts to a mere tenth. This gives us a value flower as shown in Figure 1.5. The flower is a simplification. It is probably possible to come up with hundreds of different kinds of values. We must also not forget value beyond what we humans like. We live in an anthropocentric age where, out of recklessness, we often put humans at the center, to the detriment of animals and nature.

Now follows a brief review of the five times two perspectives in the value flower.[32]

Economic value is often function-oriented and transaction-based, calculated in the money paid or saved when various goods and services are exchanged. Economic value for oneself is usually called a salary or payment and is something you get when you have created or delivered something of value to others. Economic value can also be about economizing, trying to be more resource efficient. Some also help others create financial value, such as banks that help their customers manage money.

Figure 1.5 The value flower with its ten different perspectives on value (5 × 2). Translated from Lackéus (2018).

Social value is about making people happier or alleviating their suffering. It is a broad category – what people value in life is multifaceted and partly subjective.[33] Some examples of social value are having close relationships with other people, expressing their identity, learning new knowledge and skills, improving their personal health and feeling safe and secure.

Enjoyment value is when you do things out of pure joy and to have fun. It can be deeply engaging and creative work tasks, cultural experiences or experiences where you get to do or learn something new. Such activities are often both challenging and inherently inspiring and can lead to a mental state of flow where people are completely mesmerized, feel competent and sometimes lose track of time.[34]

Influence value is when people gain influence, reputation, power or other influence on others in society, for example for managers, politicians or celebrities. Influence value can also be about everyday actions that deeply affect another person, such as parents who raise their children, employees who help customers and colleagues at work or teachers who help their students grow. Central to influential value is people’s desire to perform, a deeply human driving force.[35] People’s need for meaning in life can also be satisfied by gaining influence over others.[36]

Harmony value is about the value of a harmonious whole, either culturally or in relation to justice, ecology, equality or the public good. It is an often collective and conditional type of value that is situation-dependent and based on common values.[37] It is therefore often a more complex type of value that comes into focus in more advanced societies. An everyday example is that many cinema visitors want popcorn, even if they otherwise never eat popcorn.[38] A more complex example is the UN’s seventeen goals for sustainable development,[39] a kind of value model with seventeen meanings. They are about trying to reduce global poverty, hunger and climate change and instead promote health, equality, ecology, security, sustainability, inclusion and more.

Value for oneself is often called self-interest or egoism. Sensory experiences, satisfaction, power, wealth and becoming a winner are often discussed here. This perspective is many economists’ favorite perspective and is illustrated by their view of human as a homo economicus – an economically self-optimizing being who needs to be given incentives to do good for others so that it also benefits oneself. The goal is value for oneself and the means is value for others.

Value for others is often called altruism or being a social being. Here, creative actions that make a difference and that give a sense of togetherness and meaning together are often discussed. The focus is on relationships, job satisfaction and commitment. Many sociologists see human as a homo sociologicus, a social being who does good to others by her own inherent power. The goal is social cohesion and the means is that value is created by many and for many. A beautiful collectivism, but it is probably seldom that simple. In practice, value for oneself and value for others are often closely linked,[40] which is illustrated by yin and yang in the value flower. Doing well by doing good.

These ten different perspectives show the incredible breadth of different kinds of values ​​that students can create for others when they work to create value in school. But why is that other person so important? We’ll get to that now.

… to at least one external stakeholder …

We humans actually care much more about others than we think.[41] Unlike all other species on earth, we have a strong mutual altruism, we really care about each other.[42] Evidence of this unique behavior can be found in biology as well as sociology, anthropology, psychology and evolution. It’s about dopamine, but also about empathy, morality, pathos of justice, peer pressure, equal treatment and respect. Contrary to what many people try to make us believe in today’s individualistic society, we humans are usually really polite and helpful to others, and we also like to be.[43] Cooperation is in fact such a hallmark of our species that evolutionary scientists call us humans “ultrasocial” beings.[44] The author Lasse Berg (2006, p. 265) describes our social side as follows:

We have a desperate need to belong together, of human closeness, of being able to help each other in larger groups, of getting appreciation, of getting to feel the warmth of solidarity. It is this community that gives our lives its meaning. We perish from loneliness.

There seems to be a deep human need to help others. Not only our loved ones, but also complete strangers. We humans seem to prefer to stick together, cooperate and uphold moral principles.

Now perhaps avid egoists object to this sugarcoated version of human nature by saying that all these forms of kindness and helpfulness are just a kind of disguised or delayed egoism. A way to appear in better days, to be part of the gang, to get own advantage later, to avoid exclusion or to get a higher status in the group.^[45] Purely evolutionarily, there are also clear survival gains from collaboration.[46] This is especially true of species that manage an equal-for-equal strategy – helping those who contribute and punishing those who exploit others.^[47]

Here, perhaps, it does not matter much exactly why we humans love to help outsiders. In this book we do not have to solve the almost eternal question of whether humans are capable of pure altruistic selflessness or not. What matters is that so-called prosocial motivation theory works well in practice to motivate and engage school students. Social interaction with external stakeholders in order to try to help them seems to be a surprisingly powerful learning oxygen, and deserves its place as the largest and most important of the launchers on our spaceflight towards motivation for the schoolwork moon.

Surprise has been a recurring pattern during the decade I have spent studying students who try to create value for others. Teachers are surprised that students are so motivated. Students are surprised that they get to do something they feel so strongly about while at school. Parents are amazed at all the exciting things students get to do at school. Outsiders in the surrounding community are surprised when students take up space in the community and contribute. It seems to be precisely the interaction with and value creation for outsiders that is the biggest source of surprise. Adults find it unexpected to see competent children who contribute.

My own surprise has mainly been about why value creation for others is so unusual in school, and why I, as a nerdy Chalmers researcher in the Department of Entrepreneurship, am one of the few who suggest this to teachers. Especially when so many teachers agree and recognize the power of students’ value creation for others. How long have you teachers really known about this elixir of learning? And a slightly more serious question – why has such powerful learning oxygen been used so rarely in school so far?

I honestly do not know the answer to that question. Maybe the way we have chosen to organize the school has this unexpected side effect? Or is it perhaps a widespread view of children and young people as passive recipients of education and discipline instead of active and capable rocket pilots? Maybe it’s a Piaget-inspired assumption that students have not yet reached the stage of development required for them to be able to help others with something?[48] ​​Juul (1997, p.11) writes in his book on competent children that we adults have “made a decisive mistake when we assumed that children were not real people”. Qvortrup (2009) believes that we seem to see young people in society as incompetent human becomings or not-yet-adults, and regrets a widespread view of them as unable to contribute to society before the day they got their first job.

When I ask teachers if they think that their students would be able to handle value-creating activities aimed at outsiders, I often hear that “my older students would probably be able to do it, but maybe not my younger ones”. Both primary and middle school teachers have said this. It makes me wonder if students too seldom get a fair chance to use and develop their inherent ability to create value for others here and now. To paraphrase the child psychologist Margareta Berg Brodén (1989):[49]

Perhaps we are mistaken – perhaps students are competent to create value for others.

… outside their group …

A natural start in value creation for many students is to be able to do something that helps a classmate. It probably happens quite naturally in all the classrooms in the world. According to evolutionary biologists, we are ultrasocial beings. But how often is it a conscious strategy on the part of teachers? In fact, more and more often. A phenomenon that is becoming more widespread in schools is cooperative learning. One of the recommended strategies is to make the students mutually dependent on each other in a positive way, for example by letting them need each other to succeed in something.[50] This often strengthens both learning and social ties. A kind of win-win situation.

It is worth remembering that competitions rather represent a negative interdependence, a kind of win-lose situation. When some win, others can see themselves as losers. We can not conclude that competitions work only by measuring the breadth of the winners’ smiles. I have a research colleague in the UK who has made it her most important research endeavor to strongly object to the widespread competition in education.[51] There are absolutely other ways to create interdependence than to make the majority of our students feel like real losers. Both cooperative and value creation pedagogy describe such alternative ways.

It is not easy to draw a line between cooperative and value creation pedagogy. The question is also whether it even makes sense. But I do not want to repeat here all the fine strategies that cooperative learning has developed over the years. They have also already been nicely described in many other books. So let’s pretend for the moment that some kind of boundary goes when students do something that becomes valuable to someone other than their own group or teacher.

… class…

A natural next step in value creation is to go outside one’s own class but still remain in one’s own school’s safe environment. This is probably already happening in many schools around the world. Students who help on an outdoor day, sit on the student council, hold a sports lesson or exhibit their work at a school fair. Here, value creation pedagogy can contribute with new perspectives that reinforce what is already being done. I am convinced that students can be persuaded to take much greater personal responsibility in cross-class activities.

Four simple control questions I usually ask myself when I hear a customary story about what is already being done at a school are:

·   Did the activity build on a student’s own idea or passion?

·   Was something done that had not been done before at that school?

·   Was concrete value created for others that the student received feedback on?

·   Did the students get to try and try again and learn from their mistakes?

Four simple questions taken from each of the four corners in the diamond model in Figure 6.5 in Chapter 6. With a few simple steps, what is already being done at a school can have a much stronger effect.

… or school

When students are allowed to meet people outside the school, it is usually called Collaboration school-work life or Collaboration school-world. However, this does not seem to be a particularly prioritised issue in our society. How often do study and career counselors with their hats in hand come to both teachers at their own school and representatives in working life, and ask: “Could you consider letting these students get a little knowledge of the world around them?” In school, it should not really even be an issue. Yet every year, career counselors are tirelessly heard reminding their colleagues that knowledge of the world around them is the Whole School’s (damn) responsibility. I sometimes wonder quietly, is not it the responsibility of the whole society? What happened to the saying that it takes a whole village to raise a child? Instead, it feels as if career counselors are responsible for a difficult cooperation with polite but fundamentally uninterested people.

Counselors I meet usually appreciate value creation pedagogy. Almost every year, they invite me to their big national conference where they talk about counseling issues. I have been there a few times and really felt among friends, but I rarely have anything new to tell. The seven or thirty-one words are always the same. I guess counselors like the change of focus from a distant future for the students – “What do you want to become when you grow up, little friend?” – to activities here and now where students can create value for others outside the school. I also think they like the change of perspective. Instead of the outside world creating value for the students through the usual study visits, school visits and fairs, the students create value for the outside world in thousands of different ways. There is probably no more powerful way to get a feel for a future profession than to take action and try it out in practice here and now.

There are many school activities that are almost value-creating, but that stumble on the finishing line in collaboration with outsiders. A blog no one reads, a job interview where no one is to be hired, a student parliament where no real decisions are made or an exhibition where visitors only come to be nice. Students are certainly not stupid. They quickly see through an activity that is not meaningful. But they play along, especially if it is to be assessed. However, we adults can do better.

I am often struck by how small the piece of the puzzle is that needs to be added to reach much further. Do exactly what you are already doing, but add a challenge to the students to try to create concrete value for those you still intended to meet outside of school. Students often have hundreds of ideas if they get the chance to brainstorm, and it does not matter if they fail. It is the attempt that counts. Think sandwich in Madrid.

Something that is also often missed is how much students can achieve when all three launchers are full of learning oxygen. An entire class that goes to great lengths to make a difference can build up extensive knowledge in an area in just a few months.

A circular process of immersive flow

Now it’s time to put all the words and phrases together into a whole. It is not an easy task. There is a risk that it will be a simplification that does not capture the full magnitude of the phenomenon. But Figure 1.6 nevertheless shows a circular process that includes much of what I have just described.

Figure 1.6 value creation pedagogy illustrated as a circular process of flow.

A good starting point is strong emotions. Few things can trigger our imagination and creativity as much as emotions. Hopefully, the fantasizing then leads to some form of creation, a concrete result, perhaps a prototype or an experience that can be tested on outsiders. Did it become valuable? What did they think? When students receive much sought-after feedback from outsiders, we again get strong emotions that trigger new imagination, creativity and new creations. Then it goes around, round after round. Throughout the circular process, students continuously gain new energy and motivation through constant dialogue with the outside world. Emotions are aired with outsiders, ideas are tested, creations are displayed, values ​​are created.

Hopefully, the process is also characterized by flow, defined by creativity researcher Csíkszentmihályi as a good balance between challenges and one’s own ability.[52] In that case, students occasionally lose track of time. They start doing school work during breaks, voluntarily. When that happens, we know we’ve got them into flow. Then nothing can stop them from learning in-depth.

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Engeström, Y. (1999). Activity theory and individual and social transformation In Y. Engeström, R. Miettinen, & R.-L. Punamäki (Eds.), Perspectives on activity theory Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Fayolle, A. (2007). Entrepreneurship and new value creation: the dynamic of the entrepreneurial process. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Feldman, DB, & Snyder, CR (2005). Hope and the meaningful life: Theoretical and empirical associations between goal – directed thinking and life meaning. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 24(3), 401-421.

Fiske, ST (2008). Core Social Motivations – Views from the Couch, Consciousness, Classroom, Computers, and Collectives. In J. Shah & W. Gardner (Eds.), Handbook of motivation science New York, NY: Guilford Press. pp. 3-22.

Fohlin, N., Moerkerken, A., Westman, L., & Wilson, J. (2017). Basic book in cooperative learning: the path to the collaborative classroom. Lund: Studentlitteratur.

Frankl, VE (1985). Man’s search for meaning. New York City: Simon and Schuster.

Goss, D. (2005). Schumpeter’s legacy? Interaction and emotions in the sociology of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 29(2), 205-218.

Graeber, D. (2001). Toward an anthropological theory of value: The false coin of our own dreams: Springer.

Gärdenfors, P. (2006). The meaning-seeking man. Stockholm: Nature and culture.

Harari, IN (2015). Sapiens: a brief history of humanity: Nature & culture.

Hattie, J. (2011). Visible Learning For Teachers: Maximizing Impact On Learning. London: Routledge

Helgesson, C.-F., & Muniesa, F. (2013). For what it’s worth: An introduction to valuation studies. Valuation Studies, 1(1), 1-10.

Hoff, E. (2010). Playful children become creative adults. Cross-section – on humanities and social science research, 3(10), 14-17.

IBM. (2010). Capitalizing on complexity: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study. Somers, NY: IBM Institute for Business Value

Jarvis, P. (2006). Towards a comprehensive theory of human learning. New York, NY: Routledge.

Jonassen, DH, & Land, SM (2000). Theoretical foundations of learning environments. London, UK: Routledge.

Jones, C. (2011). Teaching entrepreneurship to undergraduates. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.

Juul, J. (1997). Your competent child: on the way to new values ​​for the family. Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand.

Labaree, DF (2005). Progressivism, schools and schools of education: An American romance. Paedagogica historica, 41(1-2), 275-288.

Lackéus, M. (2013). Developing Entrepreneurial Competencies – An Action-Based Approach and Classification in Education.  Licentiate Thesis, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg. (ISSN: 1654-9732)

Lackéus, M. (2016). Value creation as educational practice – towards a new educational philosophy grounded in entrepreneurship?  Doctoral thesis, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. (ISBN 978-91-7597-387-6)

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[1] Freely translated from Wittgenstein (2010).

[2] See Blenker et al. (2011), Jones (2011) and Vestergaard, Moberg and Jørgensen (2012). There is also closely related literature that deals with entrepreneurship as value creation, mainly Bruyat (1993), Bruyat and Julien (2001) and Fayolle (2007).

[3] See Lackéus (2013).

[4] See Lackéus (2016, 2017).

[5] See Gärdenfors (2006) and Frankl (1985).

[6] See Rizzo, Schiffrin and Liss (2013). See also Baumeister et al. (2013, p.511).

[7] See Baumeister et al. (2013) and Metz (2009).

[8] See Lackéus, Lundqvist and Williams Middleton (2016).

[9] Read more about traditional versus progressive education in Labaree (2005) and Cuban (2007).

[10] See Lackéus (2016, p.53) and Lackéus, Lundqvist and Williams Middleton (2016, p.790).

[11] Dewey (1939) has very wisely written about this in his book on value.

[12] Read more about the important role so-called prior knowledge plays in e.g. Hattie (2011, p.25) and Jonassen and Land (2000, p.14).

[13] Read about this in Smith and Ragan (1999, p.27).

[14] My favorite text is his book Towards a comprehensive theory of human learning (Jarvis 2006).

[15] See, for example, Shernoff et al. (2003).

[16] See Csíkszentmihályi (2008, p.74).

[17] See, for example, D’Mello et al. (2012) who writes about how confusion can strengthen learning.

[18] See Berg (2005, p.144-186) and Harari (2015, p.83-120).

[19] See Berg (2005, p.206).

[20] Read more about human creative joy in Goss (2005), Metz (2009) and Feldman and Snyder (2005).

[21] For an overview of Vygotsky and his Russian successors, see Engeström (1999). See also Strandberg (2009).

[22] See, for example, the definition of creativity in Reid and Petocz (2004).

[23] See OECD (2019), Zahidi et al. (2020) and IBM (2010).

[24] Metz writes about this (2009, p.8).

[25] See Lindström (2006) who writes about difficulties in incorporating creativity in school.

[26] For an in-depth look at what inhibits creativity, see Ramberg de Ruyter (2016).

[27] Ramberg de Ruyter (2016, p.39 and 47) describes how the National Agency for Education and the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise see it as trying to dissolve the dichotomy between knowledge and creativity.

[28] According to Lucas and Venckute (2020).

[29] See Boud, Cohen and Walker (1993), especially Mulligan (1993) and Postle (1993).

[30] Read more about different perspectives on children’s creativity in Hoff (2010).

[31] See, for example, Graeber (2001), Stark (2011), Dewey (1939), Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) and Helgesson and Muniesa (2013). Texts by me, see mainly Lackéus (2016, p.11-19; 2018; 2021, p.35-46).

[32] This review is a brief summary of an article by Lackéus (2018). See also Lackéus (2017) for an in-depth reasoning about value for oneself versus value for others.

[33] Read more about this in Seligman (2012) and Costanza et al. (2007).

[34] Read more about the “flow theory” in Csíkszentmihályi (2008).

[35] Read more about this in Fiske (2008) and in McClelland (1967).

[36] See Baumeister et al. (2013).

[37] For more information, see Boltanski and Thévenot (2006).

[38] Read more about conditional value in Sheth, Newman and Gross (1991).

[39] They are described in the United Nations (2015).

[40] See Batson and Shaw (1991).

[41] According to Bregman (2020, p.232-234), many see themselves as helpful but others as selfish.

[42] According to Berg (2005, p.265).

[43] This is the basic thesis in Bregman’s (2020) book about man as basically good.

[44] See, for example, Neuberg and Schaller (2013) and Tomasello (2014).

[45] Read more about this in Batson and Shaw (1991) and in Batson et al. (2008).

[46] See Neuberg and Schaller (2013, p.25).

[47] See Axelrod and Hamilton (1981, p.1393).

[48] ​​Piaget’s work with children’s developmental stages has had a great impact on pedagogy during the 20th century, but in recent years has begun to be increasingly questioned, see Egan (2002).

[49] Berg Brodén’s phrase “Perhaps we have made a mistake – perhaps children are competent” was quoted in the introduction to Juul’s (1997) book Your competent child as an important source of inspiration.

[50] See Fohlin et al. (2017, pp.115-130).

[51] The colleague’s name is Catherine Brentnall, see for example Brentnall, Rodriguez and Culkin (2018).

[52] Se Csíkszentmihályi (2008).

[This is an English translation of the introduction found in my new book in Swedish about value creation pedagogy, see image and on link here]

Introduction

Actually, it is a bit too early for me to write a book on value creation pedagogy. After many years of research on the subject, I still do not think I understand the phenomenon well enough. Too many key questions remain unanswered. Too many powerful moments I myself have experienced and been able to observe as researcher amaze and confuse me. When I was first asked a few years ago if I wanted to write a book, I therefore said no thanks. It did not feel right. For sure, we clearly saw the strong light from the glow of value creation pedagogy succeeding in lighting up many students’ motivation. But our understanding of the fervor of learning felt like on an 18th-century level, much like how scientists of that time understood fire as a phenomenon. The chemists then believed that there was a magical substance called phlogiston, which contained all combustible material. During combustion, the phlogiston flowed out of the matter, and only the ashes remained. Today we know that phlogiston was a flawed theory, albeit useful in practice. It is instead oxygen the fire needs to take off, an element that when it was finally discovered was called “fire air” and “elixir of life”.

However, a primitive understanding of why fire burns has never stopped man from making fire and taking advantage of the heat. Therefore, I have now dared to write a book, even though we still have a lot to learn about value creation pedagogy. I now intend to take the risk of spreading a primitive phlogiston theory around students’ learning. Because even if we do not fully know why something works, we can still let ourselves be warmed and rejoiced.

In the book, I will describe the effects we see of value creation pedagogy, explain why we think they arise, and describe how teachers on their own can achieve these effects. The focus will be on the latter. If there is something that now feels important, it is to spread the knowledge about how teachers with the help of value creation pedagogy can light the fire of learning in the classroom and make students passionate about school work.

The three basic principles of value creation pedagogy

Value creation pedagogy is about letting students learn by trying to create something of value for others. Learning is still the goal, but value creation for others is a powerful means that enhances learning. Students are strongly motivated by the feeling of meaningfulness that this way of working creates. They learn more in-depth and take greater responsibility for their learning. At a collective level, the class community is strengthened and leads to fewer conflicts between students. The teaching profession also becomes more fun and more meaningful.

Value creation pedagogy is based on three basic principles. Later in the book I will go into them in more detail. But let me first briefly introduce them here:

1. Value creation for others that results in feedback. First and foremost, value creation pedagogy is about students being allowed to try to create something of value for at least one person outside their own group, class or school. It is the attempt that counts. The value the students try to create can be social, cultural or economic. The attempt should preferably result in some form of feedback from the party or parties the student tried to create value for. Because such feedback is like rocket fuel for a space rocket. Full throttle ahead in their learning.

2. Interaction with real individuals in the outside world. It is possible to create value for others without meeting them, but the personal meeting gives the learning even better momentum. Value creation pedagogy derives much of its primordial power from social and emotionally charged encounters with other people, preferably people whom the student does not know very well or not at all. Therefore, social interaction with people outside one’s own group, class or school is absolutely central.

3. Fine-grained mix of learning and value creation. When theory and practice are mixed, we get in-depth learning among the students. But theoretical learning and practical value creation are unfortunately like oil and water. They separate spontaneously. Therefore, teachers need to constantly strive for as fine-grained a mixture of the two as possible, preferably every week. So that it becomes something like a vinaigrette or even a tasty béarnaise sauce. This requires value creation pedagogy to be integrated into regular teaching. Otherwise it will probably not be a rocket ride, but more a kind of isolated sparkler that will soon go out. A nice break from an otherwise rather boring school day.

Let me give a small example. Imagine a student writing a letter to a famous author of a book the class has just read. The student writes the letter with the hope of getting an answer and therefore makes a little extra effort to write so the author gets something out of the letter (basic principle 1). Here, however, it is far from certain that there will be any feedback. But if an answer still comes, perhaps because also authors like to get feedback, then there will be euphoria for the student (rocket fuel). If the author also takes a liking to the class and wants to come and visit, physically or digitally, the feeling is strengthened that something special is really happening (basic principle 2). If the letter is also written as part of formal education, rather than in a book circle outside the teaching, then the emotional bubble also leads to core teaching being strengthened (basic principle 3).

Pure oxygene for students’ motivation

It is not easy to describe in words the effects we see of value creation pedagogy. Perhaps, however, through metaphors we can approach a description that does the phenomenon justice. What we see is that value creation pedagogy ignites a fire within the students that burns so strongly that teachers and other adults are often surprised, sometimes even amazed. It may be a student who has previously been diagnosed or judged to need special support due to school fatigue, but who then suddenly and unexpectedly blossoms and becomes among the most productive and committed students in the entire class.
Just as oxygen accelerates the fire, value creation pedagogy can make many students’ motivation in their education begin to glow intensely. For teachers, it is then a joy to see the flames of learning flare up in students, or even in whole school classes, where it was perhaps previously most resembling an extinguished fireplace. It is probably not an exaggeration to call value creation pedagogy distilled learning oxygen, or even a kind of elixir of learning.

I myself have strong memories of the moments when I got to enjoy this elixir in my own schooling. The first time was probably when my French teacher at Burgården’s high school sent me on a two-week exchange trip to Burgundy in France, followed by an equally long visit to my family by a living French guy my age. I especially remember the dinners in France with his parents. I could really see how happy they were when I tasted the mold cheese and drank the table wine. Amazing how happy adults can become from seeing minors drink alcohol! It’s also amazing that a little mutual cultural value creation could make me learn French with completely different eyes. My view of language skills changed fundamentally in Chalôn-sur-Saône.

The second time was at Chalmers University of Technology in my hometown Gothenburg, when we in a simulation course in year one got to help Swedish roller-bearing corporation SKF in analyzing their production line for roller bearings. No simulated production line then, but the living real-life production line that spat out thousands of shiny steel sausages every day. My memories from the traditional workshop floor in the Old Town in Gothenburg are still strong. I see myself committed to standing there with the timer clock in full swing, fantasizing about how much more efficient the production might be thanks to us. I don’t think the production manager got any benefit from our diligent work in the end. But that was not how it felt for us. We really helped SKF! I got the highest grade in the course, which was not so common for me at university.

The starting point of my life-long interest in helping others

The third elixir was in 2001 and is still on-going today, twenty years later. Value creation-based learning is not only a strong elixir, it can also be quite addictive. I if anyone know this, because I have overdosed it on myself. For you as a reader, it can be good to know that I myself have taken the highest possible dose of the medicine I recommend to others in my book. For me, this medicine led to an inverted career and a year of sick leave, but also to a lifelong interest in creating new kinds of values ​​for others. I’ll explain shortly. But let’s take it from the beginning.

In 2000, it was time for me to choose a master’s program at Chalmers. I had heard from my fellow students who had not taken study breaks for language studies (in France for my part of course), that there was a master’s program that was extremely fun. Students had to work “for real”. The cohesion in the class was very special and also included the teachers. Based on a technical invention, the students were commissioned to try to make a difference in the community, far outside Chalmers’ safe campus area and in close collaboration with the researchers who had hatched the idea. Everything was apparently called entrepreneurship, a word I myself had no relation to at all. But it still sounded fun, so I applied and was admitted to the program.

Little did I know then how this education would completely change my life path. I had thought that I would become a technology consultant in the industry, just as many of my classmates became. Instead, I graduated and then continued working on the invention we had had to take care of in our student project at Chalmers. My first job was as a low-paid CEO in the transport industry at the small start-up company we started ourselves, which had difficult financial problems. The only glamorous thing was my fake title. I was director of almost nothing. But I was very happy. The classmates called us the diesel rats. Our mission was to help truck drivers save diesel in new ways. We built new digital technology that gave drivers feedback on their driving patterns. After many years of frustrating work, we got it to work, and today Ecodriving Challenge is the world’s largest competition in eco-driving for trucks. Never before in my life had I done anything as insanely motivating. But I also got to taste the reverse side of commitment and passion.

Warning for overdose and language confusion

One day I could not get up from the plush sofa we had in our office. For real. It was not possible to get up. So in the spring of 2004 I had to go home and rest for a year. The doctors called it exhaustion. The elixir had made me burn so much for what I did that I only had ashes left in my head. Not a speck of phlogiston remained. Another month after the crash, I remember walking in disbelief and in slow motion at the train station. Why are all people in such a hurry, I thought.

For a while I was actually a little bitter too. An educational effort had led me into a career path where, after only a few years, I both reached my level of incompetence and was on long-term sick leave due to over-engagement. Certainly a voluntary education, but hardly properly declared. For how could Chalmers describe what awaited their students, when I, as a researcher and teacher in the same education twenty years later, still cannot find the right words? Today, I think it was not the education that caused over-engagement, but entrepreneurship. Fatigue is now a known side effect of entrepreneurship. Therefore, I regularly ask my students to reflect on various stress symptoms.

I was lucky. Not everyone returns after such a crash landing. I returned as CEO and sales manager for our growing business. But in 2009 an unlikely opportunity arose, and I left the company I had co-founded, which by then had grown to about fifty employees. Instead, I returned to Chalmers as a project manager and later a doctoral student at the master’s program where I myself had been wrapped in a kind of crazy but wonderful space rocket and launched into a shaky orbit around the earth. My inverted career was thus complete: from CEO to sales manager to project manager to student. Back in the same old pale yellow former palliative Vasa hospital. Was it now time for me to receive care in the final stages of my career? No, a new journey as researcher began. My research question was of course:

What did they really do with (people like) me in that education?

This has been my main research question now for almost twelve years. And the initial bitterness has been transformed into a fascination that only gets bigger and bigger every year. But also in semantic frustration. Because when I try to describe what we see that students experience, it rarely goes well. We can not even use the word I once learned that this was an example of – entrepreneurship. This word often leads to various misunderstandings, especially in primary and secondary schools. Many teachers believe that we mean economic value creation for the students themselves, that the students should learn to earn quick cash. Or that we mean that all students must now start a business and learn to do accounting.

But we meant something completely different – to let students learn knowledge and skills more in-depth by trying to create all sorts of values ​​for everyone but for the students themselves. Without focusing on money or starting up any new legal entity. So we instead called it value creation pedagogy. Then people listened more attentively to what we had to say. I certainly learned as a doctoral student to never introduce new words when there are established words that can be used. But that was not the case here, the established language apparatus was crashed. Despite this new semantics, we still find the phenomenon’s roots, primordial power and concrete methodological support in the field of entrepreneurship. Although we sometimes need to put different entrepreneurial methods in a kind of semantic washing machine and wash away the economic connotations.

It’s the emotions that do the trick

Early on in my doctoral journey, I found a perspective with great explanatory value around the power of value creation pedagogy, namely the crucial role of emotions for learning. There is probably nothing that burns knowledge into the brain stronger than a really emotional storm. When we think back on our own moments of crucial learning, it’s probably often about highly emotionally charged moments. It can be one of life’s many frustrating moments of failed attempts. Or maybe a moment of euphoria over having learned to ride a bike, swim, read or play the piano. In the high mountains and deep valleys of the emotional jungle, we often find learning in its most colorful form. This is not to say that all learning must be equally deeply emotional. But the biggest source of emotion in our studies turned out to be to do something for another human being.
One of my own most emotionally charged learning moments is again about language. After studying French in Pau in southwestern France, I had decided to learn a new language, whatever. The elixir had certainly intoxicated me. The choice fell on Spanish. I prepared myself by reading up on the first two years’ words, phrases and grammar, on my own, as the theory-loving reading nerd I am. Finally, it was time for the long-awaited on-site learning for four months. On a rainy April day in 1999, I landed in the middle of the center of Madrid and was looking for temporary housing. Ten identical attempts at the telephone booth at Puerta del Sol to call on advertised rooms all ended in the same way – with a click in the handset. I started with the phrase “¡Hola! Quería alquilar una habacation, por favor ”. A simple question about renting a room. Each time, a customary Spanish harangue came up with answers that I did not understand at all. To which I replied “Do you speak English?”. Click.

What then became my vital lesson from this very emotional failure? Well, that theory without practice can work very poorly. I had prepared meticulously with all the theory I could come across. Then I still could not order a sandwich – “un bocadillo, por favor”. Not to mention finding a roof over my head.

I have countless times in my research returned mentally to Puerta del Sol in Madrid. Because value creation pedagogy can come to the rescue for teachers precisely in the difficult but crucial question of how we in practice succeed in weaving together theory and practice. The value creation-based learning processes I have studied in my research often oscillate back and forth between theoretical knowledge and practical value creation. These two phenomena are then mixed in a fine-grained way, often on a weekly basis. The effect is a strong emotional experience that connects theory and practice, and burns the knowledge into the brain, in-depth. We see that many students then achieve the so sought-after in-depth learning for life, not just surface learning for the test.

Why I’ve written this book – anecdotes or research?

I would like to end this introduction with a proper explanation of why an engineer and computer nerd from Chalmers University of Technology here is trying to give teachers guidance on pedagogical issues. What can I reasonably help you teachers with? A question I myself have pondered a lot, not least on the many occasions my research has been criticized.

It has been claimed that my research on value creation pedagogy mostly consists of free fantasies and fabrications, a kind of anecdotal circus journey into the education sector and a stranger’s intrusion on pedagogical ground. But I take such statements with much calmness. The critics cannot have read the method chapter in any of our published articles. The content of this book is not based at all on my personal anecdotes, but on large amounts of carefully collected and analyzed research data from teachers and students in many educational institutions. Good research is often about, as an outside observer, holding up a mirror to those who are being researched. In our case, many teachers have nodded in recognition and liked the image they see of students’ value creation-based learning. However, some few people are provoked, perhaps because the image that is shown does not match their own desired image for education.

However, it is among my own anecdotes and emotional storms that you readers find the answer to why I wrote this book, and why for twelve years I constantly wondered what teachers did to people like me. To me, this is quite personal. My whole life has come to be characterized by value creation-based learning in various forms. First for a decade as a student, then for a decade as an entrepreneur, and finally for a decade as a researcher. Was I the only one who learned best when on a weekly basis I got to experience a fine-tuned mix of theory and practice in emotionally strong real-life experiences that involved real recipients of some kind of concrete value? The answer to that question turned out to be no. Still, today it is a rather uncommon experience for most students. Therefore, in the end, I felt a certain responsibility to write this book. My hope is that the book can contribute to many more students having a motivating school day with in-depth learning for life and with a strong sense of meaningfulness. We adults can probably agree that education is deeply meaningful, but unfortunately it is far from all students who feel that way.

The outline of the book

Part one consists of two basic chapters. First comes a detailed description of what value creation pedagogy is. Then I write about why this can be something really good for the education. After these introductory what-and-why questions comes the second part of the book where I go into more practical how-to questions. Chapter 3 is about sixteen different practical first steps that teachers can take to get started with value creation pedagogy. Chapter 4 describes eleven slightly larger steps to try afterwards. Chapter 5 is about more advanced pedagogical approaches and deeper emotionality for students, similar to regular professional practice. Chapter 6 describes various concrete tools teachers can use. The third and final part of the book is about some different perspectives that have proven to be important and promising. In Chapter 7, I go through various challenges teachers have told me they see with value creation pedagogy. A particularly important challenge is assessment, and it is dealt with separately in Chapter 8. In Chapter 9, I take a closer look at value creation pedagogy for sustainable development, and in the final Chapter 10, I take a closer look at value creation as integration. After the last chapter comes a short epilogue where I look ahead.

The focus has been on keeping the story concise and, above all, concrete. Therefore, I have also included a number of illustrative quotes and mini-interviews with teachers and principals who work with value creation pedagogy in their everyday working lives. These teachers and principals are also my teachers. Over the years, they have shown me what is possible to achieve with value creation pedagogy and how to overcome challenges, resistance and difficulties. Every time I give up, they are there and urge me to “hold on and persevere”.

Throughout the book, I will here and there give my highly personal experiences and perspectives on value creation pedagogy. It certainly goes against academic ways of writing, where the author should preferably be absent in the text. Now, my own stories may not be the most fantastic or interesting here, so feel free to take them with a pinch of salt. But they are mine anyway, and the purpose is to make the book a little more easy to read and entertaining. A little more fun, simply. It would be a shame if I wrote a dry and academically boring book on such a pleasing subject as value creation pedagogy.