Abstract:

Innovation in teacher education is regarded as a slow process which involves educators’ resistance to change and passiveness (Hess & McShane, 2013; Saxton, 2015), even though changes in educational methodologies have been applied at university levels (Michavila, 2009). It seems teaching innovation goes beyond applying new methodologies; instead, a qualitative change is needed considering a formative rationale that captures experience as the core principle in education. Grounding this rationale, a Learning Laboratory (LLab) was implemented at the Faculty of Education at Universidad Andrés Bello. The aim of LLab is to explore new educational human expressions and experimental methodologies to shape a reflective, creative, collaborative, and critical teacher educator.

The purpose of the investigation is to explore how LLab has shaped teacher educators from an innovative approach lens. These questions will be answered: What are teachers’ perception in relation to the construction of an innovative approach in their classroom activities? - What is the nature of the innovative activities teachers have implemented in their classrooms?

Llab was created in the Faculty of Education and Social Sciences to install a formative rationality in teacher educators from a broad and eclectic perspective in their learning/teaching. It focuses on the experience teachers go through when being exposed to broad learning strategies that enhance creativity, artistic expression, critical thinking, inquiry, technology, interdisciplinarity, emotionality, and autonomy. These experiences aim at developing reflection, collaborative work, and inquiry from a bidirectional perspective. The trajectory of Llab experiences consider factors such as emotions, humour, use of space, linkage, interaction, surprise, materiality, dialogue, and bidirectionality.

A group of 60 teacher educators have been participating in the fortnight LLab sessions from 2016. The sessions include activities routed by a non-lineal bidirectional map. As for example: from the invisible to the visible and from the visible to the invisible, from the individual to the collective and from the collective to the individual, from emergent to the classic and from the classic to the emergent, from the world to the classroom and from the classroom to the world, from silence to dialogue and from dialogue to silence, from certainty to ignorance and from ignorance to certainty, from local to global and from global to local, and many other bidirectional concepts.

The instruments to collect data include teacher educators’ narratives and photo elicitation to answer the first question, and collection of innovative projects to answer the second question.

Results show that teacher educators have become inquirers and have undergone a qualitative change in their teaching approaches, from a linear or traditional approach to a more flexible, creative, inclusive, and ‘disruptive’ vision in their praxis. As Ellis & Child (2019) claim, innovations in the field of teacher education needs a new lens of the sense of creativity and agency, having a future orientation rather than a status quo.

Keywords:

Educational innovation, teacher education, creativity.