Developing a Context-Sensitive Entrepreneurship Pedagogy for Nigerian Higher Education: Theory, Evidence, and Practice

This dissertation develops an original context-sensitive entrepreneurship pedagogy framework for Nigerian higher education institutions, making theoretical contributions to entrepreneurship education theory and providing an evidence-based practice guide for Nigerian university and polytechnic entrepreneurship educators. Entrepreneurship education in Nigeria has expanded rapidly in recent years, but the pedagogical models adopted are predominantly derived from Western, particularly American and European, university entrepreneurship programmes whose epistemological assumptions, pedagogical methods, and programme designs are poorly adapted to the Nigerian educational, cultural, and enterprise context. The dissertation argues that this pedagogical misalignment undermines programme effectiveness and produces graduates with decontextualised enterprise skills that do not equip them for the realities of Nigerian entrepreneurship. The research employs a design-based research methodology in three phases: a diagnostic phase involving systematic review of Nigerian entrepreneurship education research, structured observation of 30 entrepreneurship courses across 10 institutions, and interviews with 40 educators and 80 students; a design phase in which an original context-sensitive pedagogy framework is constructed in collaboration with a co-design panel of Nigerian educators, entrepreneurs, and students; and a validation phase in which the framework is piloted across three institutions and evaluated through pre-post assessment, educator feedback, and 12-month graduate tracking. The resulting Context-Sensitive Nigerian Entrepreneurship Pedagogy framework introduces original pedagogical principles including embeddedness learning, which uses local enterprise case studies as primary pedagogical texts, and communal entrepreneurial simulation, which replaces individual business planning with collaborative team ventures modelled on real Nigerian enterprise formation processes. Keywords: entrepreneurship education, pedagogy, Nigerian higher education, context-sensitive teaching, curriculum design.