Supporting Bricolage as Leadership for Systemic Pedagogical Innovations

Abstract

Innovation has become an increasingly important theme in education. Since the last decade of the twentieth century, there has been a mushrooming of systematic education reforms in many countries around the world, resulting in some cases deep changes in the curriculum, the pedagogical activities as well as the roles of teachers and learners. A major challenge in education is how to sustain and scale up innovations. This paper argues that much of the efforts in systemic educational change are only systematic changes. Complex systems are characterized by the high interconnectedness among different components. Sustainability and scalability should be part of the system design and can only be achieved if mechanisms for opportunistically setting up social infrastructures to support bricolage and innovation-centered networking are in place. This paper draws on the case studies of innovative pedagogical practices using technology collected in the Second Information Technology in Education Study Module 2 (SITES M2) to illustrate this claim.