From Pedagogical Discourse to Policy: The Irruption of Educational Innovation in The Public Agenda

Abstract

Educational innovation occupies a central place in contemporary pedagogical discourse. Innovation is associated to educational improvements of a different nature, but also, in a broader sense, to the configuration of schools as a modern educational institution. Although it tends to be conceived as a bottom-up and even spontaneous process, educational innovation has acquired great centrality in the public agenda and in governmental education policy in some contexts. This is the case of Catalonia, where the innovation proposal has become the backbone of the administrative-pedagogical action on the education system since 2017 approximately until today. In this article we combine different theories of the public policy process to analyse how the innovation discourse has penetrated the Catalan educational policy agenda. Policy process theories allow us to analyse the construction of educational problems and their solutions, and the conditions under which certain solutions are more likely to break into the public agenda. Drawing on a process tracing approach, the results of the study show how, in Catalonia, the proposal of educational innovation is defined in opposition to teacher-centred, knowledge-transmitting education (often referred to as 'traditional education') and, as a solution, it is rooted in the ideas of 'personalisation of learning' and 'competence-based education'. Thanks to its apparent simplicity, but also its ambiguity, the idea of innovation has operated as a 'coalition magnet' with the capacity to attract previously separate educational actors and to organise them around a pro-innovation alliance with an influential 'educational transformation' agenda. This, together with the viability of the proposal, which emerges in a unique political and economic scenario, has allowed innovation to become the flagship and binding element of recent Catalan education policy.