Inovação educacional

: dimensões, modos de adesão, consequências pedagógicas e organizacionais: estudo de caso

Abstract

When profound technological changes and significant scientific advances seem to shake educational systems, intensifying the discussion about the need for an evolution that allows responding to the mandates that fall on its shoulders and to the challenges that the new environmental, economic and social frameworks impose to educational institutions and their communities, educational innovation is on the day order. Public discourses and educational policies put it on the agenda, although they do not do so uniformly, as is shown by the debate around the evolution of the school model as an individual and pragmatic consumerism or as a common good in the public space. However, the studies published on this subject have sought more to narrate and disseminate experiences rather than to understand them in their complexity, not being generally anchored in developed theoretical frameworks on the concepts of educational innovation, leaving behind important issues such as the reflection on why to act and how, and what pedagogical and organizational changes should be implemented and for what. This study seeks to understand how educational innovation is being processed in a school integrated into a broad dynamic of innovation in a network group of schools in Portugal, considering i) the areas in which it occurs, ii) the key dimensions that can enable it to be successful, and iii) the appropriation by social actors that feature it, with the goal of understanding the respective modes of adherence and their consequences. This is an exploratory, descriptive and interpretive study, in which the effects of the innovative actions adopted by the school at the curricular and organizational levels are presented and discussed, taking into account: the Horizon that innovation aims to achieve; Professional teaching collaboration in daily school life; Leadership; Student engagement; Resources and infrastructures to support innovation; Permanent evaluation; and the Impact of innovation in the classroom. The results support the idea that educational innovation is not a one-off activity, but a path filled with tensions and dilemmas, ups and downs and contradictions, which, on the one hand, reflects the vitality of the processes of change inherent, experienced and jointly constructed, and, on the other hand, allow us to identify learnings that may shed light on its future development. Those “lessons” point to the need for a further coherent and inter-connected development of the dimensions at stake, through which collaborative cultures and the needed knowledge can be developed to achieve deeper learnings at all levels and by all protagonists.

Date of Award	12 Jun 2023
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Joaquim Azevedo (Supervisor)