VIII Forum on Education (VI). What did it mean to my personal and professional experience belonging to an innovation network

Notes from the Forum on Education. Innovation and networking, organized by the Institute of Education Sciences (ICE-UAB) and the Institute of Government and Public Policies (IGOP), and held in Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain, in January 10 and 11, 2014. More notes on this event: forumedu2014.

Round table: What did it mean to my personal and professional experience belonging to an innovation network.
Chairs: Miquel A. Alegre, membre de l’Institut Català d’Avaluació de Politiques Públiques (Ivàlua).

Martí Olivella, director de Nova – Innovació Social.

Enabling learning is like being a sower. The teacher seeds and grows seeds of transformation in fields of opportunity and is persistent so that seeds can germinate, grow and produce.

If there is no crisis, there is not an opportunity of change.

Innovation is about making happen things that are statistically unlikely.

Examples:

  • Fighting against the compulsory military service through objection of conscience or insubmission.
  • For a better quality of democracy. Deliberation is not voting: citizen parlaiament.
  • Rethink cities as transition towns.

Keys for transformation:

  • Social innovation: structural transformation. To ask ourselves what we are doing and why is already an transformer action.
  • Network: a team of teams with synergies.
  • Educational: we transform ourselves by transforming others. Education for transformation = transformation for education.
  • Passion.

Agnès Barba, founder of the Xarxa 0-6 de Bellvitge and director of the School els Encants de Barcelona.

To create a network of schools and all other people outside of schools that have to do, in some way, with education. The goal being how to make a comprehensive accompaniment to kids’ learning.

When a new school is created, the only way to create it is by taking into account all the stakeholders and agents related with the education of kids. And that is done through networks.

A basic aspect for a network to work is meeting together, talking, discussing, exchanging information, feelings, doubts, approaches, proposals.

Jordi Adell, coordinator of the Centre for Education and New Technologies of the Universitat Jaume I de Castelló (CENT).

Belonging to networks of teachers is highly transforming and reshapes how one faces their own teaching.

Educational institutions are beginning to shift from being isolated places where education happens, to be nodes of huge networks that enable learning.

Networks work well if one contributes to them: the more you give, the more you get.

Networks are a window to the world: my classroom is the world. There still are many degrees of freedom within the educational system and networks are one of them.

There are a lot of emerging teaching and learning methodologies, many of them enabled by technology. There is a lot of innovation ongoing and we must make it visible, share it.

For complex systems, good practices do not work. Good practices are good for simple or complicated systems, but not for complex systems. For complex systems we must look not at practices, but at patterns.

For analysing and realizing patterns, theories work very well. Theory is not opposed to practice, but complementary.

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IX Fòrum Educació (2014)