Gardening at School for New Good Life: Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Education in the Public Schools in Nepal

Abstract

Entrepreneurship skills are isolated from school science curricula in the context of Nepal. The study explores the students' engagement in the school garden for entrepreneurship resulting in sustainable education. It explicitly reconnoiters the interconnection between entrepreneurship skills through mushroom farming and the curricula of basic-level public schools. Also, the study explores the pedagogical approaches to contextualized teaching and learning for sustainable education for a new good life. A qualitative research design under the interpretivism paradigm with a purposive sampling technique was employed to select the schools and the research participants. Qualitative data were collected through eighteen in-depth interviews and nine focus group discussions and were analyzed using the Atlas-ti software. The study found that students, parents, and teachers actively engaged in mushroom farming in the school connected activities with curricula and enjoyed learning by earning. The contribution of this study chiefly lies in making a new good life through mushroom farming for economically backward parents. It is recommended that the Ministry of Education of Nepal’s government needs to formulate policies regarding entrepreneurship-based sustainable education in the context of school education in Nepal.