Laboratory Innovation For Education (LIFE)

The Laboratory Innovation For Education (LIFE) is led by Prof. Olivier Maulini.

Research Fields

The Laboratory Innovation-Formation-Education (LIFE) intends to develop knowledge on the innovation and knowledge of innovation. The main objective of our works is to describe and to explain better and better the processes of innovation in educational context, in a systemic angle, interactionnist, history and comparative at the same time. The transformation of the systems of training do not follow a logic of unambiguous progress.

They result from actors' confrontation who defend interests, but also visions of the training and the values, and who develop as a result of the strategies in favour of certain changes, of the status quo or from return to past. The innovation is constantly negotiated within the organizations of training and in a wider social field, the knowledge stemming from the research being only one in the sources of legitimacy of the proposed changes.

The social stake in the works of LIFE is to propose to the actors or to elaborate with them more and more realistic models of the way we can conceive, pilot, estimate, regulate and make a success of the processes of innovation in the world of the education, by taking into account the variety of the points of view and the complexity of the systems, but also by respecting two global orientations: a participation of the actors in the decisions which concern them and a democratization of the access to the knowledge and to the skills. The innovation is thus for us a social practice, an object of studies and a powerful analyzer of the power relations and the relations with knowledge which interpenetrate necessarily in the field of the school and the training.