The pedagogical work between human capital and decolonial doing: resignifying innovation in management and teaching

Abstract

This article analyzes the challenges of pedagogical work and the professional development of managers and teachers in the face of neoliberal rationality. The objective is to problematize the hegemonic conception of market-oriented innovation, which reduces the school to an "organization" and professionals to sacrificial "human capital". Methodologically, it is a theoretical essay based on a bibliographic review that articulates the critique of coloniality with the analysis of the precariousness of educational work. The decolonial perspective proposes a reinterpretation of innovation that values ​​ancestral knowledge, insurgent pedagogies, and educational practices that emerge from resistance. The discussion proposes a resignification of pedagogical practice in light of the decolonial perspective, advocating for epistemic disobedience and the hacer decolonial (decolonial doing) as pathways toward epistemic justice. It concludes that innovation, from a decolonial perspective, resides in practices that humanize and subvert productivist logic, promoting an anti-racist, anti-sexist, and socially referenced education. The innovation we advocate for is one that reaffirms the school as a time-space of resistance and re-existence, where other worlds are not only possible, but necessary.