Calls for papers

 

International Journal of Innovation in Education

 

Special Issue on: "Re-configuring Learner Experiences: Opportunities and Systemic Challenges"

Guest Editor:
Liang See Tan, Letchmi Devi Ponnusamy and Dennis Kwek, National Institute of Education, Singapore

In the 21^st century, the demand and complexity of empowering learners with broader learning experiences poses a key challenge to schools. Given the emphasis on the future outlook of 21st century competencies, educational change and innovation are looking to re-configure students’ learning experience beyond the achievement of high-stake examinations.

Research in many areas such as the neurosciences and learning sciences have advanced our knowledge and understanding concerning learning and teaching and how to bring about deeper learning and change in our learners. Despite the availability of such empirical evidence, schools and educational systems are facing persistent issues and challenges in embracing and translating such new knowledge into day-to-day classroom instruction and practice. Given the historical and social contexts in schools, education systems are struggling with the sheer challenge of having to re-contextualise and re-culture learning and teaching in schools. For these reasons, instead of adopting systemic changes for improvement, educational change and innovation have been sporadic, piecemeal, restrictive, and therefore unsustainable.

This special issue aims at exploring the multiple contexts, processes and outcomes of educational and school innovation shaping educational change today, and to raise awareness of possible issues and challenges faced by educational systems, schools and teachers in this endeavour. Such understanding can provide educators with insights into how to make such innovations more defensible and sustainable.

While the focus is on classroom and school innovations, each paper in this special issue should critically examine the systemic tensions that impact on such innovation efforts, and how opportunities to transform learning can be made possible despite of, or even in the presence of, such tensions. For this reason, articles that showcase empirical studies documenting and examining actual innovations and how they seek to achieve broader learning goals are also preferred. Articles should also engage in the dialectics between classroom innovations and systemic leverages and constraints, opportunities and opportunity costs, and/or change and resistance to change.

Subject Coverage
Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Learning that moves from knowledge acquisition to knowledge building
• Teaching that calls on a re-examination of the contemporary perspectives of curriculum, e.g. from that of curriculum as product to that of curriculum as praxis
• Classroom innovations that shift predominantly monologic to dialogic pedagogies
• Greater teacher ownership and leadership of curriculum and educational innovation
• Design and development of educational change
• Systemic issues, tensions and affordances in creating innovative learning environments
• Challenges and outcomes on reconfiguration of curriculum in schools

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper has been completely re-written and if appropriate written permissions have been obtained from any copyright holders of the original paper).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process.

All papers must be submitted online. To submit a paper, please read our Submitting articles page.

Important Dates

Submission of Manuscripts: 21 December, 2016