Dialoguing with teacher-educators, valorizing teacher innovations

This article describes the educational innovation fairs (EIF), a large-scale collaborative action research initiative undertaken by an academic institution and the teacher-education department of a provincial government in India over a three-year period (2015 to 2017). The EIF initiative primarily sought to help teacher-educators in 26 sub-provincial teacher training institutes (STTIs) realize the potential of teacher-generated innovations to enrich the teacher training curriculum in the state-run schooling system. It required teacher-educators to identify and validate innovative teacher-generated work, that was then displayed for two days in a year in a public exhibition visited by a large number of teachers. Case studies of the displayed work were then sent to schools and used in teacher training programmes. The EIF experience indicates the importance of setting the political and academic context carefully if action research is to take off in the public education system. Second, the policy adaptation that is inevitable in such a system implies an understanding of the deviations that might be considered tolerable. Finally, the partners need to jointly reflect on and consciously plan their post-collaboration individual trajectories during the collaboration itself, for the outcomes of action research have to be embedded in an evolving research agenda aimed at continuous improvement.