Pedagogical Innovation in French Higher Education: Official Discourses and Field-Level Practices

Pedagogical innovation has, in recent years, attracted increasing attention within French higher education institutions. This interest encompasses institutional policies, learning objectives and outcomes, and pedagogical practices, and reflects broader transformations in higher education governance across Europe. The literature points to several interrelated factors underpinning this development: i) growing expectations that higher education programmes should prioritise a professionalising dimension; ii) the massification of higher education, accompanied by increased socio-school diversity and heterogeneity; iii) persistent concerns regarding academic failure and student dropout, particularly at undergraduate level; iv) advances in digital information and communication technologies; and v) a turn to teaching. In the European context, this shift has been closely associated with the Bologna Process, initiated in 1999. The Bologna Declaration established a voluntary, intergovernmental process aimed at reforming national higher education systems. Since the 2007 Ministerial Conference, Bologna has explicitly promoted a shift towards student-centred learning, framing pedagogical innovation as a key lever for transforming teaching and learning practices. This paper engages with the hypothesis advanced by Magnússon and Rytzler (2018, 2022) that the architecture of the Bologna Process, by extending in a standardised manner “from the organisational level down to the classrooms and the teaching of the individual teacher” (Magnússon & Rytzler, 2018, p. 192), has contributed to the emergence of a hegemonic pedagogical paradigm. We examine how Bologna functions as a top-down policy agenda, while also considering the forms of bottom-up appropriation it enables or constrains. Empirically, the paper draws on a case study conducted in a large Paris-based university with a strong focus on STEM fields. The analysis combines document analysis with semi-structured interviews and attends to different analytical scales, exploring how policy frameworks are articulated through institutional discourses and enacted in pedagogical practices. The results indicate that pedagogical innovation initiatives are generally not integrated into a coherent institutional policy. Instead, they are undertaken as isolated actions, often supported through competitive, project-based funding. Because such funding is not allocated on a continuous basis, ensuring the long-term sustainability of these initiatives proves difficult. The findings also reveal limited institutional coordination and ongoing challenges in evaluating the impact of pedagogical innovation, particularly in establishing causal links with student success, an indicator that occupies a central place in institutional discourse. At the same time, the existence of a centre for pedagogical experimentation emerges as an interesting institutional mechanism. By supporting small-scale initiatives, fostering faculty agency, and providing specialised expertise, such centres may help translate bottom-up pedagogical innovations into top-down policy objectives. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for understanding the Bologna Process as a mode of governance and for analysing how European higher education reforms are translated and reconfigured at both institutional and field levels. References Magnússon, G., & Rytzler, J. (2018). Approaching higher education with didaktik: University teaching for intellectual emancipation. European Journal of Higher Education, 9(2), 190–202. Magnússon, G., & Rytzler, J. (2022). Towards a pedagogy of higher education: The Bologna process, didaktik and teaching. Routledge.