Knowing How to Learn: Leadership, Knowledge Management, and the Challenge of Creating Learning Communities

Abstract

This paper argues that the traditional approach to organizational change, leadership, is not useful to help create learning communities because it harbours an implausible theory of the mind and of learning. An updated knowledge management perspective, it is claimed, is the more productive framework, once it updates its traditional theory of knowledge as split between the «tacit» and «propositional». Knowledge management needs to embrace the currently best (neuro) scientific account of brain function, and how humans acquire knowledge: distributed cognition and the Extended Mind. The Extended Mind expands distributed cognition in focussing on the cognitive work done outside of ‘skull and skin’ in our social-technological environments. Mind, the source of human learning, is thus better understood as a distributed cognitive system that challenges traditional views of learning and individual expertise but also points to more fruitful ways how to create sustainable learning communities in education and elsewhere.