Learning History

Origins of Learning History

Learning History was developed first in the early nineties at MIT's research centre for organizational learning (which later went on to become the Society for Organizational Learning). The idea of the ‘learning organization’ as an entity with the capacity to learn effectively and hence to flourish had been popularized through the work of Peter Senge and others at MIT. Their text The Fifth Discipline, and its associated field book, had a wide appeal to management practitioners and academics alike. However, the link between learning and business success remained tenuous. Could learning be claimed if it wasn't clear what lay behind good or bad practice, successes or failure? It was in an attempt both to clarify how learning occurred and to stimulate it more widely that Learning History was conceived. It was, in part, a response to an imperative for evaluation and also for a different kind of experience-based learning.

Though working in the management learning field and situating themselves clearly within the Action Science tradition of Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, the originators of Learning History, Art Kleiner and George Roth, took wider inspiration from the age-old practice of oral history. Looking to this and recent works of social history (e.g. Studs Terkel's oral history–based stories of America), they set the ideas of oral history—listening, voice and story—at the heart of a research process. The emphasis on personal story is crucial to Learning History. It brings specificity, [Page 493]detail and feeling and so surfaces that which is tacit. As the cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner writes, narrative deals with the ‘vicissitudes of intention’. An oral history will describe the ups and downs of experience, the changing fortunes and moments of doubt and reasons for action caught in a moment of time. These are unique but also universal in their way. It is by staying close to these specifics of experience that Learning History is attempting to get past what Roth and Kleiner called a mere listing of ‘best practices' and into ‘the thinking, experimentation and arguments of those who have experienced the same situation’.

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