Institute of Education

Research & Expertise to Make a Difference in Education & Beyond

Papers by IOE Experts Featured in Springer’s New Volume on Educational Reforms and Innovation

Several academic papers by leading experts at the HSE Institute of Education have been featured in Springer’s newly released volume Reforms and Innovation in Education, edited by Alexander M. Sidorkin and Mark K. Warford. The authors explore various factors and processes shaping the relationships between educational reforms, as driven by deep and progressive socioeconomic changes, their effects on innovations across the educational realm, and the implications for the quality of human capital.

An integral part of national and global socioeconomic ecosystems, education has been in a constant state of growth and evolution, fueled by its multiple stakeholders’ ongoing reform efforts that have varied in nature, scale, and innovative impact. According to OECD’s 2014 Measuring Innovation report, the educational sector ranks second worldwide after manufacturing by the intensity of innovation incentives.  

Amidst today’s dashing move into a new era of ubiquitous digital transformation, automation and global transdisciplinary cooperation, with the principal emphasis placed on the economy of knowledge, advanced social interaction and non-routine labor, there has been a pronounced call for yet more streamlined, comprehensive and higher-payback innovations in education. These are expected to make learning & development settings, and primarily the mass-participation public segment, much better placed to provide the broadest cohorts – far beyond the traditionally small intellectual elite – with global awareness, ICT savvy, social and emotional intelligence, critical reasoning, resourcefulness and other skills vital in the new economic context.

However, alongside this apparent demand for appropriately skilled, future-proof human capital, and accordingly, a clear rationale for improving education through further transformative efforts, there have been multiple and deep concerns about whether educational systems are actually capable of changing fundamentally, as they have often been found to be repulsive to diffusible and sustainable innovation. For example, while education is an information-intensive industry, there has been so far little evidence to confirm that the expanding ICT penetration has led to appreciable improvements in curricular and learning outcomes across educational settings. Furthermore, many scholars have noted the paradoxical stability of ‘classroom life,’ with learning organization and instructional routines, such as lectures, group activities, question/answer tasks, textbooks, conventional homework, etc., basically left intact and reproducing themselves time and again. Finally, given that public education systems are also meant to fulfill an essential role in striking a better socioeconomic parity, the inability to cope with their own persisting gaps in achieving more inclusive and equitable learning environments is also alarming.

What kind of processes are actually in conflict with making educational innovation diffusible and sustainable? How are various sectorial, institutional and human factors implicated in reforms and innovations? Better understanding these and other relevant questions, comprehensively addressed in Springer’s newly released volume edited by Alexander M. Sidorkin and Mark K. Warford, is important for the entire range of stakeholders across the educational realm.
                     

Gain more insights by exploring the volume’s specific chapters: