INNOVATION PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH – STRATEGIC VIEWPOINTS

The concept of innovation pedagogy is still rather untouched in pedagogical discussions on higher education and thus there are few research reports or academic discussion on the topic. The concept is also wide and multidimensional by nature, making its interpretation often dependent on the context and forcing its focus on specific issues connected to the task at hand. Often the definition is used in the context of innovative pedagogy, focusing on the operational level of innovation pedagogy and neglecting its strategic nature.
In addition to the operational level, or the implementation of the concept, innovation pedagogy focuses also on the learning contents and on that how the education in universities of applied sciences can enable the creation of innovations in working life, both in companies and organizations as well as in educational institutions. Innovation pedagogy is therefore to be considered more like an approach, offering a lot more opportunities than a toolkit of learning and teaching methods. This paper aims to discuss the concept and approach of innovation pedagogy on strategic level, introducing it as a strategic decision of an educational organization. The paper presents how innovation pedagogy can be seen as a interactive continuum between the educational organization, students, and surrounding working life and society, and why a holistic and strategic approach is needed and which the outcomes are.
In this paper we introduce the concept of innovations pedagogy, which was developed in Turku University of Applied sciences, discuss its nature from a strategic perspective, and provide justification to it. We further develop the already published ideas behind innovation pedagogy and define how this pedagogical approach can be applied to a university strategy.