Our theme workshop on October 19 turned into a great discussion about the 2010 theme, “Innovation in History: Impact and Change.” This is a theme with a lot of nuance, and the attending teachers and staff contributed some really interesting insights about the little quirks of “Innovation.” Here’s a list of some of key points to emerge from our workshop.

• Students must consider an innovation’s time and place. If students wanted to study the innovation of peaceful protest, they would have to research back thousands of years to find the inception of that concept. Instead, they could study how a peaceful protester, such as Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr., used peaceful protest methods that were innovative for their particular time and place.
• Invention and innovation are not interchangeable words. Many inventions go through several modifications before they achieve success, but the end result is not necessarily an innovation. Edison’s lightbulb was not an innovation; many others had created some form of that invention. Edison’s innovation, instead, was the system he helped create that made use of the lightbulb easier.
• Not all innovations have a significant impact. Students must consider if an innovation significantly changed the way people lived or was a significant change to society. Women’s bloomers changed the way that women were able to function in society, but fashion innovations such as the mini-skirt or bellbottoms did not affect the same sort of significant change.
• Non-invention innovations can often allow for greater depth of research. Instead of researching the invention of the camera, students could research the innovative ways that cameras were used in wartime. Governmental innovations, such as the Three-Fifths Compromise or the Homestead Act, are great examples, too.
• Innovations do not have to have a “positive” impact. The Third Reich’s use of the Lebensborn program, which provided resources to women and families who had “Aryan” children, was very innovative, but had certain eugenics qualities about it.

When helping students choose topics, guide them through their interests and help them ask questions about time, place and significance. Students may settle on an invention, because they believe that is the only course, but you can help them choose more creative topics by exploring the world outside of the creation of a new piece of technology.