A Study of Knowledge Management Theory for Building School Capacity : D.H.Hargreaves on Knowledge-Creating School

Abstract

In recent educational reform, local management of schools have promoted schools to create distinctive education activities on one's own, to forge a good relationship with local community, and to undertake accountability. Through those various effort, schools must provide basic academic abilities and social skills for students. And schools must build trust with parents and local community. Those are key problems in the school management. Furthermore, in research aspect, some serious educational problems(for example, classroom breakdown or relentless bullying) that is beyond the capacity of individual teachers to respond have been coming up. These changes and problems require school teachers not only to act individually but also to react collectively or organizationally about every educational activity. So, the main theme in research and practice of school management, I think, is 'How we build the capacity of schools'. But so far, theory about organizational change in school and research about school effectiveness and improvement have not fully explained the way to build school capacity successfully. So I think that knowledge management theory is very suggestive and significant. Because this theory can explain the process of capacity building in organization. For the purpose of exploring the building school capacity, this paper presents and examines knowledge-creating school theory by David H. Hargreaves, a British educational sociologist, who applied the knowledge management theory to school. Thus, This paper will describe and examine his knowledge-creating school theory by: 1) focusing on process of organizational knowledge creation in school. 2) focusing on lateral capacity building in school. 3) focusing on personalising learning for transformation in school. 4) considering some significances and challenges of his theory.