In a nutshell
Entrepreneurship education doesn’t only teach students what to know. Its language may also implicitly teach them to see themselves as people who can use that knowledge to make things happen.
Every academic discipline has its own way of talking. Historians might talk about what the evidence suggests, scientists about what the results indicate, and accountants about what the figures show.
Entrepreneurship has its own way of talking too: a lot of “we tried this”, “I realised that”, “then we pivoted”, and, inevitably, “we needed more money”. But how does that way of talking actually shape what students learn? Could the language used in the classroom be teaching something beyond the content itself? That’s what this paper by Tyler Stillman set out to investigate.
The idea behind this is what sociologist Basil Bernstein called invisible pedagogy. It refers to what students may pick up indirectly through the way educators speak, behave, and frame the world around them. The opposite is visible pedagogy, which is the straightforward kind we usually think of as teaching: an educator explains a concept, demonstrates a method, or gives students knowledge that they are expected to learn.
Stillman wanted to explore what kinds of invisible pedagogy are present in entrepreneurship education, and what that might tell us about what students are learning beyond the formal course content.
To do this, he compared 17 talks from a university entrepreneurship speaker series with 17 talks from a cross-disciplinary speaker series at the same US university. The sessions were similar in format, class size, timing, and setting, to make sure they’d be useful for comparing how entrepreneurship was talked about with how other subjects were discussed. Stillman then analysed the transcripts for recurring linguistic patterns, specifically linked to agency, time, social impact, capital, and risk.
Publication year: August 2026
Authors: Tyler F. Stillman
Institutions: Southern Utah University, USA
Study type: Empirical linguistic analysis
Sample Size: 34 speakers across two university speaker series: 17 entrepreneurship speakers and 17 cross-disciplinary speakers
Research focus: Examining whether entrepreneurship education has a distinctive linguistic style, and how that language may reflect visible and invisible forms of pedagogy.
Research Methodology: Systematic linguistic analysis of publicly available lecture transcripts. The study compared entrepreneurship talks with cross-disciplinary talks from the same university, analysing language linked to agency, temporal orientation, social impact, capital, and risk.
Main findings: Entrepreneurship talks used substantially more first-person language such as “I”, “we”, and “our”, as well as more action-oriented verbs, suggesting that speakers may implicitly model an active, agentic way of approaching the world. They also contained substantially more references to capital and financial resources, reflecting the explicit knowledge taught in entrepreneurship education. Smaller differences appeared in future-oriented and social-impact language, while explicit risk language was less common than expected.
Citation: Stillman, T. F. (2026). Beyond “Do as I Say”: The Invisible Pedagogy and Implicit Modeling of Entrepreneurial Agency. Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy. Link
Some of the findings were exactly what you’d expect. Entrepreneurship speakers talked much more about capital, funding, investment, and financial resources than speakers from other disciplines. That is the visible pedagogy: the explicit knowledge that entrepreneurship education is clearly there to teach.
The more interesting difference was hidden in much more ordinary words. Entrepreneurship speakers said “I”, “we”, and “our” far more often. Where other disciplines tended to use more impersonal phrasing like “the evidence suggests” or “the financial statements show”, entrepreneurship speakers were more likely to put themselves directly into the story. They also used more verbs associated with deliberate action, such as creating, developing, acting, and initiating.
This means that entrepreneurship speakers are showing students, again and again, that problems are things you can act on. When they repeatedly tell stories about what I did, what we changed, or what we built, they are demonstrating what it looks like to act with agency – and implicitly teaching them that the world around them is something they can influence. Stillman argues that this may be one of the invisible lessons of entrepreneurship education: students are exposed to a way of speaking in which people are active protagonists, capable of noticing opportunities, making decisions, and changing what happens next.
An important caveat is that this study only looked at how entrepreneurship is spoken about, not at what students actually absorb. It shows that entrepreneurship classrooms have a distinctive linguistic pattern, but it does not yet prove that this language makes students more agentic, more confident, or more likely to act entrepreneurially.
Still, the pattern is there. It suggests that giving students the right knowledge may only be half the job; the way entrepreneurship is talked about may also shape whether they see themselves as people who can do something with it.
At SSES, this action-oriented approach is visible in Entrepreneurial Mindset, where students apply entrepreneurial methods across disciplines; Ideation – Creating a Business Idea, which develops opportunity recognition and idea evaluation; and Execution – Running Your Own Company, which takes students through the practical steps of launching a venture.
For related research, see Rethinking Who Fits the Mould in Entrepreneurship Education, The Role Model Effect Is Real, and The Problem with the Entrepreneurial Mindset.
