Why education is not just about innovating - FoE Research Seminar - Bianca Thoilliez

Why education is not just about innovating

Prof Bianca Thoilliez, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain

Tuesday 8th December at 12 noon

Abstract

We live in a time of the imperative of innovation, of change, of transformation for the school and its professionals. Times that some have called a certain “innovaphiliac”. Yes, we educate to help others to prepare for the future, a future that is uncertain and that, therefore, pushes educational activity to be in permanent movement of attention to that unknown future. Education is called to respond, to adapt and to prepare more and better for the future. However, we also educate, we must not forget it, not only to prepare the following generations for the future, but also and above all, as an act of preservation with which to legate an ecological, linguistic, cultural, ethical, scientific, artistic heritage, so the new generation can carve out its own future. This is why, emphasizing among teachers the mandate to “prepare for the future” has two main problems: we deprive education of its conservative dimension and we deprive the new generation of the freedom to define their own future. My intervention will try to analyze these two problems and offer some reasons from which teachers can resist the imperative of innovation in education.

Bio:

Bianca Thoilliez is Associate Professor at the Department of Pedagogy at Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. In July 2019 she has been appointed Visiting Professor of the Faculty of Education at the Edge Hill University, UK. In August 2018, she was elected Board Member of the International Network of Philosophers of Education (INPE).