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The emergence of innovative work in school development

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Abstract

In this article, we analyse the school developmental work of a project team in Norwegian upper secondary schools. The team aims to improve teaching and learning by making use of new technologies. The aim of the article is to explore the “black box” of developmental work practices by analysing the interactions between the team members to make the processes transparent and reveal how work becomes innovative and newness is created. The theoretical framework builds on cultural–historical activity theory. The study shows how innovative work is brought into being when pluralities of perspectives are externalised in a team’s discussions. Moreover, for innovative work to result in school-wide and sustainable change, systematic inquiry into the underlying contradictions of schooling is warranted.

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Notes

  1. Rebecca was from Riverside, Anne from Hillsdale, and Monica from Rockton. For the sake of anonymity, they are all female.

  2. See "Appendix": Transcription Convention.

  3. The notion of trajectory (e.g. Dreier 1999; Furberg 2010; Vennebo and Ottesen 2011) is important because it allows an exploration of participants’ orientation to each other and their concerns over time. In other words, it expands the moment-to-moment analysis and takes into account how actions and interactions are linked over time and across space to constitute innovative work. Moreover, when studying the project team’s work as a trajectory, we are able to capture socio-temporal aspects of their object construction and the variety of resources in use.

  4. Yearly ICT conference arranged at Riverside school and directed towards school leaders and teachers in secondary and upper secondary schools interested in ICT, teaching and learning. International as well as national speakers are invited as key contributors.

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Acknowledgments

This work is financially supported by the Department of Teacher Education and School Research and FALK research group for research on workplace learning in the knowledge society (http://www.uv.uio.no/forskning/grupper/falk/) at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Oslo. We thank our colleagues at the Department of Teacher Education and Research, members of FALK and participants of the Norwegian Graduate School of Education Research (NATED) for their advice, support and constructive criticism. Finally thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Teacher Education and School Research, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Kirsten Foshaug Vennebo & Eli Ottesen

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  1. Kirsten Foshaug Vennebo
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  2. Eli Ottesen
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Correspondence to Eli Ottesen.

Appendix

Appendix

Transcription Conventions

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Pause that last less than half a second

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Pause that last longer than 1 s

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Inaudible speech

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Transcripts annotations (text italicized)

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Vennebo, K.F., Ottesen, E. The emergence of innovative work in school development. J Educ Change 16, 197–216 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-014-9234-0

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