Innovation needs reflection: How experiences from emergency remote teaching can become sustainable learnings through collective inspection

Higher education was in flux even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, triggered by shifts in the world due to digital transformations for quite some time. This has raised calls for new models of leadership, new teaching-learning conceptions and new organizational cultures, alike. The experiences of emergency remote teaching during the pandemic are, in this sense, not to be seen as a crisis to survive, but as an opportunity for transformation. However, it remains contested whether experiences made under crisis conditions can lead to sustainable learning and change. Based on crisis research, pragmatic theory on the meaning and function of reflections, and the concept of organizational resilience, the following chapter argues that collective reflection plays a pivotal role in transforming experience into sustainable change in higher education teaching and learning. This will require innovation not only in the way we conceptualize and organize teaching itself, but also how we can innovate in the processes and structures of higher education to foster new ways for collective reflection.