What this paper argues
Conventional entrepreneurship education keeps adding content — sustainability modules, design thinking, social enterprise electives — to an operating system built for a world that no longer exists. This paper argues that responding to the polycrisis requires something more fundamental: pedagogy organized around cultivating the inner capacities transformative action actually requires. It presents the Tiimiakatemia Changemaker Lab at The Evergreen State College as an evidence-grounded case study of what that looks like in sustained practice — the first extended English-language study of a functioning North American Team Academy.
The evidence base
The study draws on 650 narrative faculty evaluations, over 120 student self-evaluations, and contemporaneous practitioner observer notes collected between 2018 and 2025, analyzed through Braun and Clarke's six-phase thematic analysis with independent second coding and member checking, under institutional IRB approval. The author writes from the dual position of academic researcher and founding faculty team coach — a duality the paper treats as both its greatest methodological asset and its most significant limitation, addressed through deliberate inclusion of disconfirming evidence.
Four findings
Personal mastery and agency formation. The most pervasive theme in eight years of data: learners moving from passive reception to self-directed agency — in one changemaker's words, from "being told what to learn to owning what I need to become." The paper documents a "courage amplifier" effect: when practitioners of real external authority (in one documented case, a federal judge in four hours of substantive dialogue) validate a young founder's vision as real and consequential, something shifts that no classroom exercise replicates.
Mental model transformation and systems thinking. Through Iceberg Model analysis, stakeholder visits, shared reading, and 360° peer evaluation, learners surface and transform their assumptions about what is possible — including their assumptions about where learning itself happens. A real nonprofit board meeting held in a public library, observed by ordinary patrons, is documented as the moment a young leader "stops seeing themselves as a bystander to the system."
Team learning and collective intelligence. Team companies achieve what no individual could — public expos, global hackathons, ventures with operating revenue. The paper also honestly documents where team learning fails, including a cohort whose dialogue circles a student experienced as exclusionary — an unresolved challenge the model names rather than hides.
Real-world impact and community embeddedness. Ventures documented across the record address housing insecurity, youth sports access, healing justice, disability inclusion, and community governance — with formal organizational registrations and impact beyond the program. "The community is not a case study here. It is the room."
Theoretical grounding
The analysis integrates Senge's five disciplines of the learning organization, Kolb's experiential learning cycle, Bandura's social learning theory, Rosen's anticipatory systems, and — centrally — Scharmer and Pomeroy's (2024) framework of fourth-person knowing: knowing that "comes through me but is not of me," the epistemological capacity the polycrisis demands and conventional education systematically excludes. Eva Pomeroy's direct response to the Lab's documented practice — "the opportunity, structure, support and mentorship to connect with a future that is looking at you and needs you to come into being" — constitutes significant external scholarly validation.
Status and access
This paper is forthcoming in Responsible Enterprise Pedagogy (Emerald Publishing), Special Edition: Team Academy and Team Coaching — expected September 2026. This page summarizes the submitted manuscript; the full text will be posted upon publication. For scholarly correspondence or a preprint conversation: dion@changemakersteamacademy.org.