Identity production and educational innovation: the case of the Interdisciplinary School Research Program

Abstract

Educational innovations are disruptive processes within schools and can affect not only students’ learning but also other aspects of their lives and of their schools’ culture, such as the identity of its members. This study attempts to understand how an educational innovation opens up new spaces of identity configuration within a school and how students and teachers produce meanings by participating in it. To do so, we present a case study from the Interdisciplinary School Research Program about a school named Sagrados Corazones de Manquehue, based on semi-structured interviews with the actors involved in this project and an analytic approach drawing from grounded theory. Our findings show that innovation can configure a space in which new identities are produced through emergent discourses, practices, and external acknowledgement. At the same time, this new space impacts both the students’ self-knowledge and the teachers’ professional development, and furthers a strong sense of community among the members of the program. However, it also implies a constant risk of reproducing some of the excluding dynamics of the school.