2025/10/02 by Nika Maglaperidze, Michael Sherlock, Elizabeth O’Brien · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Art Education and Development #Educational Environments and Student Outcomes #Literacy, Media, and Education
paper · doi:10.1080/03323315.2025.2570777
openalex publication_date 2025/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Education and innovation have always had a tension-filled relationship, with the latter historically associated with technological and economic novelties. It is small wonder that in these late capitalist times innovation has been claimed and captured by market forces, a process which has also undermined Initial Teacher Education's fundamental role in supporting plurality and educational action. By bringing Hannah Arendt's vita activa in conversation, we can confront this reality by distinguishing between two fundamentally different kinds of innovation: one that is imposed, instrumental, and market-orientated versus one that is emergent, relational, and educational. We demonstrate this through a specific ITE classroom experience from the Irish context, where a student teacher's engagement with the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment led to a spontaneous event back in the university lecture hall that illustrated educational innovation's three dimensions: temporal, relational, and spatial. We argue that this form of innovation works through generative tension rather than prescriptive optimisation and qualitatively differs from market-orientated models. We also underscore the significant role ITE has to play in resisting instrumentalisation by protecting spaces where genuine innovation can appear.