Pro-innovation discourses in Geography and History classes

Abstract

Currently, educational innovation is an unavoidable premise for teachers, school headteachers and families. This contribution aims to provide better understanding of the configuration of pro-innovation discourses from a lexicometric perspective. To this end, we applied various textual statistical strategies to the analysis of a corpus made up of twelve verbal texts from four discursive fields: the education policy, the school, the Social Sciences Department and the Geography and History class in which, finally, pro-innovation discourses become practices. The results obtained, which focus on the discursive associations of innovation (collocations, combinations, concordances and co-occurrences), indicate that the meaning of educational innovation is taken for granted, that it has only positive connotations and that it functions as an argument to justify educational reform. In addition, it is noted that innovation is especially linked to new technologies and business vocabulary. We conclude this paper with a defence of the usefulness of the techniques used, but also with a warning of the need to complement the analysis carried out with other linguistic and interpretative techniques.