Challenges in Higher Education. Teaching Innovation between Experimentation and Standardization

The paper aims to investigate some challenges in the academic profession by focusing on innovative teaching practices. An exploration will be carried out on how teaching innovations is accomplished through collective and individual organizing during daily practices. By analyzing findings from the field about the governance of teaching as well as its ongoing transformation, the paper highlights new interweaving between teaching practices and organizational work in the academic profession. Teaching emerges as an autonomous sphere of governance, as a new organizational field in which opposing forces move. Managerial and accountability logic proceeds simultaneously with innovative teaching practices, forms of resistance, and new organizational formulas introduced by the actors from below. Starting from the exploration of the field, in the paper we discuss some emerging critical issues.