The education sector is highly regulated and was increasingly confronted with reform and innovation initiatives across relevant fields (e.g., kindergarten, school, university or further education, social work). In our symposium, we would like to discuss education reforms in the sense of social innovations and explore in what ways organizations in the field of education respond to risks and challenges by innovating. Concepts of social innovation comprise normative (Moulaert et al. 2013), functional and pragmatic positions (Phils et al. 2008) that range from increasing social justice, to highlighting feasible and novel solutions to social problems. Thus, social innovations do not remain at the level of abstract goals or plans but imply an intentional re-structuring of social practices (Howaldt & Schwarz 2010). Therefore, social innovations in education imply movements in knowledge resources, actor constellations, pedagogical and organizational practices and discourses of education. But all in all, the policy discourse mostly appears biased towards a positive connotation of social innovation as fostering a future-orientated and globally competitive development of educational systems. In contrast in our symposium we would like to discuss also ambivalent implications of social innovations in different fields of education.

The symposium implies two connected parts. Part 1 “Social Innovation in education as boundary work” focuses on social innovations in the educational system as a cross-sectoral process of negotiation e.g. between schools and social services, cultural or business organizations as well as between universities and organizations of civil society. Part 2 “Pathways and directions of social Innovation in education” discusses ways of emerging of social innovations in the educational system and implies a critical view on upcoming of and resistance against social innovations.

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