Educational innovation and resilience in crisis: a critical review of ICHTML 2025

The International Conference on History, Theory and Methodology of Learning (ICHTML 2025), convened on May 13, 2025, under extraordinary circumstances of ongoing military conflict and post-pandemic recovery, provided unprecedented insights into educational resilience and innovation during compound crises. This comprehensive review analyses five conference papers spanning diverse contexts - from AI integration under martial law in Ukraine's Kherson region to historical analysis of 19th-century Polish military education, from distance athletic training innovations to in-service teacher development in India's Odisha state. Through systematic thematic analysis incorporating conference transcripts and supporting literature, this review identifies convergent themes including crisis as a catalyst for innovation, technology ambivalence, multi-level resilience mechanisms, and the centrality of teacher professional development. The analysis reveals how educational communities navigate extreme disruption through creative adaptation rather than predetermined protocols, with successful innovations emerging from the intersection of necessity, human agency, and institutional flexibility. Critical examination exposes significant gaps, including limited longitudinal data, theoretical fragmentation, and insufficient attention to equity impacts. The review advances theoretical understanding of educational resilience as a multi-level, emergent phenomenon distinct from individual psychological resilience, while proposing practical frameworks for institutional adaptation, policy development, and pedagogical innovation. The conference's documentation of real-time educational transformation under extreme conditions contributes valuable empirical evidence while highlighting urgent research priorities, including longitudinal studies of innovation sustainability, comparative analysis across crisis types, and development of crisis-specific pedagogical theory. These findings have profound implications for educational systems worldwide facing intensifying disruptions from climate change, technological transformation, and geopolitical instability.