Teaching for innovation

To teach for innovation is a key ambition for current reforms of higher education and professional training. It represents an ambition to reorganise our educations and our teaching to prepare us for of an uncertain future. But how, this book asks, can we prepare for the unknown? Teaching for Innovation takes the reader through the variety of approaches to innovation in higher education and shows how different pedagogical and didactic principles come to define different visions of the future. Petersen shows how different pedagogical choices have become powerful tools that ‘secretly’ define and prescribe future social, political and economic needs. In the final part of the book, she presents three ways in which teachers and managers can work with innovation in their daily teaching. In preparing students for a world of uncertainty, Petersen argues that we should engage the student’s imagination to ‘go visiting’ different realities, to acknowledge pluralism, and to critically engage preferable futures. The book speaks to professionals and teachers alike and combines the virtues of a textbook and a research monograph. It makes visible how the many choices teachers and university managers make every day entails political visions that will shape coming generations of students.