Keywords - Chapter 9: Learning Communities at Work

Bureaucratic – learning organisations that are run according to rules and ordered by hierarchy; a setting where teachers and learners can attain ‘assisted’ competence, or teaching and learning that relies on sources of authority.

Collaborative – learning organisations that conceive themselves to be knowledge-producing communities:

• where trust is established in teachers’ capacities to create learning designs
• where learners are expected to engage with negotiated learning tasks
• where teachers and learners can form grounded, ‘out-there’ relations that extend beyond the walls of the institution
• where learners and teachers can attain ‘collaborative’ competence, learning by contributing from their own lifeworld experience, constructing knowledge with their peers, and connecting their new knowledge back into a variety of lifeworld applications.

Formal learning – deliberate, conscious, systematic and explicit learning; the kind of learning we call ‘education’.

Informal learning – casual learning in the lifeworld: intrinsic, arising from within and to be found throughout, and incidental to everyday life experience.

Self-managing – learning organisations that devolve a degree of self-governance to individuals and groups; a setting where teachers and learners can attain ‘autonomous’ competence; or teaching based on a degree of ‘self-management’ and learning based on the personal construction of knowledge.