The work of educational innovation: exploring a personalized interdisciplinary design playbook assignment

Recent decades have seen calls for scholarship related to engineering education innovation. While some focus on how to identify‘‘what works,’’ critiques such as ‘‘what works won’t work’’ raise questions about what might be valuable to disseminate withrespect to educational innovation projects. In this paper, we explore this issue by asking: What perspectives are useful for bringingto the surface insights that come out of a specific case of innovating, and with these perspectives, what knowledge do we gain? Theapproach involved reflection conversations, an analysis of these conversations for critical moments, identifying perspectives thathelp to bring the critical moments into focus, and then clarifying specific insights associated with each perspective. In the results,we discuss the case in terms of practical perspectives, latent theoretical perspectives, and experiential perspectives. In particular, wename and specifically identify demanding problem definition, a discursive approach to translation, sustained coordinated action,lurking provocation, and predictable emotional labor as key insights associated with this case. We discuss how the perspectivesidentified may be useful for others wishing to interrogate cases of educational innovation and build scholarship in this area.