Breaking Boundaries: Radical Innovation in Education

School effectiveness and improvement is identified as a priority for different reasons and interests. While some governments, groups and organisations can be motivated by the desire to be competitive in the global marketplace; others look at school improvement and effectiveness as a fundamental way of coping with personal and social development and equity issues in a growing conflicting world.
Many school improvement efforts have evolved into managerial approaches that leave the essential “grammar of schooling” (for instance, the shape of classrooms, standardized organizational practices in dividing time and space, classifying students and locating them to classrooms, and splintering knowledge into 'subjects') largely untouched. The concept of educational innovation itself has been jeopardised by educational reforms that do not take into account or scorn knowledge based on educational research and practice. These reforms might take schools back to educational practices that have proved to be good for a part of the population to meet a given set of standards, but not adequate to provide the whole population with a place to learn and to develop as individuals and citizens of a knowledge-based society.
In this context, it seems fundamental to consider the concept of “radical innovation” as a way of exploring the educational problems from its “roots” and looking for ways of coping with emergent issues at school, educational system and society level, departing from two essential questions:

• Is it possible to cross the current boundaries of school organisational structures?
• Is it possible to imagine going beyond and breaking the limits imposed by the 'grammar' rules of schooling?

Participants are invited to consider how research, policy and radical educational practices can help schools to "break" traditional schooling rules that prevent school improvement and effectiveness and to develop a more meaningful and flexible "grammar" of schooling, through eight key strands:

• Learning from radical innovative educational experiences. Research, policy and educational practice aimed to transform educational systems from its roots. The role of researchers, policy makers, teachers, parents, educational community and social systems. Innovative practices at the learning level, the innovative learning arrangements. ICT to support radical educational innovation. Challenges and possibilities.
• From educational reform to educational transformation. School effectiveness and improvement as an ongoing process. Multilevel strategies to foster and sustain school-based innovation aimed to improvement. Monitoring, evaluation and support. Capacity building, transfer - scale up/roll out.
• The role of leadership in rethinking time, space and curriculum. Leadership challenges to be faced for rethinking time, space and curriculum. Dealing with the basic ‘grammar’ of schooling rules. School autonomy, educational accountability and leadership. Capacity building, leadership development, leadership for undertaking radical innovation.
• New populations in educational institutions: inventing ways of teaching and learning. New ways of looking at teaching and learning at schools with highly diversified population. New teaching learning environments for innovative educational practices. Students' needs in the emergent conception of childhood and adolescence. Teaching, learning and assessing for understanding. Effective teaching and learning.
• Inquiry-based teacher education: taking into account teacher’s lives. Pre-service and in-service teacher education as an on-going research process. Teacher education beyond a given educational reform. Teachers’ voices, teachers working conditions. Teachers as public intellectuals. Teachers’ personal and professional development. Preparing teachers to cope with contemporary society challenges.
• Inclusive Education: rethinking democracy in educational scenarios. Rethinking the roles and functions of public school. Democracy and power relations at educational system and school level. Coping with the growing population with special educational needs (students with physical, emotional and cognitive handicaps; new immigrants, and schools in inner city, suburban and deprived rural areas). Capacity building, resources and strategies; political and economic conditions.
• Beyond learning communities: promoting citizenship through the participation of the school community. Building and sustaining school communities. Capacity building, resources and strategies, political conditions. Teachers, parents, students and local organisations and agencies involvement. School community micropolitics. The role of school council/ school board/governance in developing and sustaining school communities.
• Creating educational networks: new approaches to collaboration. Educational communities of practice at local, regional and international level. Cultural and linguistic issues. New forms of partnership, the role of outside school community organisations and agencies. Horizontal networking, challenging power relationships in collaborative projects. The role of ICT in promoting and sustaining educational networks.