Positioning emergent professional learning as catalyst for meaning making in agile work praxis

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 added new urgency to the evolution of a knowledge landscape rethink. Knowledge creators, consumers and facilitators had to function in an unfamiliar, complex and challenging context. The realisation that contemporary knowledge formation, actuality and continuation were fast becoming obsolete required learning institutions to reinvent the rubrics of knowledge creation, which requires a radical change in the knowledge economy characterised by enablement, organic co-construction, fluidity and new meaning making in a future of Agile operation and education facilitation. This thesis explores one of the myriad challenges faced by contemporary knowledge organisations. Novel views of meaning making lead to a proposed model that could serve as a catalyst for Emergent Professional Learning (EPL). EPL is positioned in the discipline of learning facilitation with the intent to propagate a new thinking methodology regarding the establishment of sustainable, progressive knowledge commodities. It establishes a full-fledged, integrated co-constructive approach that presents itself living within a broadly established knowledge base framework that aim to identify new creative and encouraging initiatives within the transforming knowledge creation structures of postmodern knowledge organisations. This study is founded on an transdisciplinary epistemological research method that will explore theorems that may enable EPL. This research challenge evokes fresh and challenging grand narratives as the researcher attempts to use and deploy a variety of epistemologically grounded research methodologies. According to Leibold, Probst and Gibbert (2015), it has become progressively clear to the researcher that South Africa's economic crisis and political climate is not conducive to curriculum development and design sustainability. Additionally, the present pandemic has an impact on and demands the creation of enhanced Agile learning. As such, the researcher purposefully builds on and refers to Leipold et al.’s seminal work on meaning making and knowledge transfer in order to establish a formal epistemological foundation for addressing the complexities of South African emergent professional learning challenges in the pursuit of Agile practice. It is argued that new forms of human capital are now needed to manifest the intellectual capacity through mobilising the facilitation of knowledge generating catalysts, envisioning the possibility of creating antifragile EPL attributes. It is proposed that knowledge-driven institutions are urged to identify new leadership characteristics to yield and reconstruct these innovative meaning making solutions into knowledge activities, thereby positioning environments that allow socialising, transfer and construction of the future landscape of learning facilitation. The research results indicate that the ideal solution for future knowledge-driven institutions would be one where leadership understands the paramount importance of knowledge and then nurtures its source: the knowledge worker. The new role for leadership is that of coachers and facilitators who invite knowledge workers to co-define the knowledge intent of the organisation and who encourage co-operation through multi-lateral communication and codetermination. The collaborative relationship between the knowledge worker and leadership is therefore crucial to establish formal communities of practice. It is pivotal for organisations to position and foster these formal knowledge communities as a the process of continuous reinvention and enable the meaning making shifts that are essential to drive new EPL. Formal knowledge-sharing establishments should facilitate progressive mindsets aligned to encourage psychological responsibility, ownership and custodianship of new meaning making, where all role players are inextricably interlinked on an integral scale, rapidly changing the future workspace within an ecological thinking framework. These insights prompted the formulation of a EPL framework that transcends the traditional knowledge establishment criterion through the application of intellective influencers, complemented by the inclusion and merging of human ontogeny (M1-3). The actualisation and application of the newly composed EPL framework positions itself as a malleable, principle-based approach that could render knowledge creation designs uniquely crafted to stimulate the exploration of future meaning making. New ways must be found to meet future educational challenges and modes of facilitating learning that could support the content designer to deal with new, unprecedented conditions – “Liquid Modernity” – and to position EPL so as to establish Liquid Modernity as a pan disciplinary insight for the next generation of academic curriculum development and design (Caldwell and Henry, 2020; Bouman, 2013). This thesis endeavours to offer an alternative vision of sensemaking regarding the future, where knowledge transfer organisations can apply EPL as an alternative tool for co-designing the learning curriculum. This will require transformational leaders who are willing to search for new ways to anticipate the future of knowledge design.