Educational Innovation and Teachers’ Human Development

Mainly in countries from the Global South, educational innovation is used as a general solution to the school’s problems based on an outcome focus without a deep reflection. In this paper, educational innovation is an individual and continuous process with a developmental quality for teachers. It is argued that the inherently positive value of innovation converts it into a higher complex phenomenon, culturally organized, that regulates teachers’ human development in innovative schools. The main objective of the studies carried out was to investigate teachers’ meaning-making process about innovation from a developmental perspective based on a cultural theoretical framework. Two studies using qualitative methodology in two innovative schools in Brazil had a sample of seventeen teachers. Participants passed through interviews and group meetings after a huge immersion in the empirical field. The meanings produced by participants were different practices, interdisciplinary work, students’ reality used to account for dissatisfaction, and collective work in individual and social dimensions of meaning-making, respectively. Results demonstrated the tension’s role provided by contextual conditions of change, permanence, and divergence. They were discussed, pointing to persistent innovation as a relational mechanism that integrates the social and individual levels of meaning-making to deepen the comprehension of innovative processes as an ongoing process, rather than a project to follow.