ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the idea of grassroots educational innovation by drawing on the work of those teachers in the public (state-run) schooling system who, in spite of many constraints, manage to initiate and implement change. It positions the “grassroots” in public schooling as those educational microsites where processes of exclusion become manifest. The encounters of innovative teachers with this context call for (a) varying degrees of innovative recombination of resources for new means–ends relationships—the “innovative behaviour” that generates a problem-solving response as a trigger for change; and (b) three entrepreneurial responses to facilitate the emergence of a new state characterised by more functional patterns of social interaction: Developing entrepreneurial roles centred around creating a local consensus on the desired change and networks to implement change, leveraging entrepreneurial characteristics to bring about the desired change, and focusing on one’s own learning. These two processes generate “social value,” which manifests itself as “grassroots innovation” or change at the grassroots—a combination of an innovative trigger for change and a new state of education. This combination lends itself to identification, assessment and sharing.
