Pushing Boundaries while Maintaining Stability: Invisible Innovation in Education Practices

The aim of this paper is to frame two major imperatives within vocational education; retention and innovation. During recent years, teachers within the context of the Vocational Educational Training system in Denmark have had to face two co-existing political demands in their everyday teaching practices: performance requirements and student retention.
Based on two ethnographic field studies we analyse situations in which the teachers’ integration of these seemingly contradictory demands can be understood as innovative transformation of participation and practice which address both aims at the same time. The exploration of transforming practices shows how disturbances in relation to the ‘normal’ practices are created and thus makes invisible conventions which are taken for granted visible. Thus, this paper addresses two types of invisibility: the unnoticed boundary-pushing practices and the unnoticed conventions which also tend to be invisible until new practices challenge their being a matter of course.