Introduction: special issue on innovative practices.(Innovative Practices)

Innovation, adaptation, and ingenuity are all words intended to provoke new thinking that moves through inquiry and insight toward an assertion or an action, but they are also words that buzz and riddle the world at large, usually with little effect. We are frequently asked to be creative or to think "outside the box," yet too often it is insisted that our thinking not move too far beyond that box. Quite often that box is one prescribed and not self-defined, sometimes it is a classroom filled with limited resources, sometimes it is a desk piled high with mandates and regulations. For many educators, innovation is already implicit in the undertaking, however, for a key segment of these educators, such buzz words when placed in their hands become skeleton keys that open the minds of learners into possibility and create opportunity.

Given the right circumstances, these calls for innovation lead to powerful actions that initiate, instigate, create, subvert, investigate, and ultimately transcend and transform biased norms or restrictive limitations. These concepts might already ring out to anyone concerned …