The Educational Innovation Group NAPCED was created over the 2017-2018 academic year in the Department of English and German Studies at the Universitat de València. Coordinated by professor Anna M. Brígido-Corachán, it included a total of 11 lecturers from the English Studies Degree who participated in four educational innovation projects funded by the Staff Development and Educational Innovation Service of the Universitat de València between 2017 and 2021. The main objective of these projects was to study the wide range of didactic possibilities offered by implementing key concepts of Critical Pedagogy and Education for Development, two of the most relevant pedagogical renewal movements of the last century, into English literature subjects of the English Studies Degree at the Universitat de València. These concepts include identitarian empowerment, empathy, respect towards cultural, ethnic, linguistic, gender, and sexual diversity, cosmopolitanism, and the relationship with one’s social environment which still articulate the group’s pedagogical approaches. These methods strive to stimulate and strengthen critical thinking, argumentation, and awareness in our second language learners.
Over the 2021-2022 academic year, after the digital and hybrid practices enacted during the pandemic, part of the group transferred these initiatives to digital environments and multimodal and intermedial formats. Then, two lecturers from the Department of Language Theory and Communication Sciences of the Universitat de València joined the group.
The original NAPCED initiative and the projects associated with the Consolidated Innovation Group NAPCED have encouraged the creation of non-hierarchical learning materials and objects, mentoring, and peer-assisted learning. Additionally, it has fostered, and still fosters, collaborative, digital, and multidirectional knowledge construction and dissemination. These pedagogical and scientific activities aim to enrich critical thinking and enhance students’ intellectual autonomy in the English and Audiovisual Communication degrees. Furthermore, it also attempts to develop studies and create teaching resources of general interest in different formative stages.
In February 2023, the Universitat de València’s Vice-Rector for Lifelong Learning, Educational Transformation, and Employment included the NAPCED team in the recently created Register of Consolidated Teaching Innovation Groups of the Universitat de València under the reference GCID23_2580121.