A Theoretical Synthesis of Knowledge Sharing and Educational Leadership for Sustaining Learning Communities

Abstract

Knowledge is one of the crucial and dominant economic resources in order to obtain sustainable advantages in any community. The world is now shifting faster thanks to the advanced development of digital connectivity and increasing access to knowledge. Leaders of a community, society, or country must contemplate what factors concerned in the emergent era of valuable network that fosters learning communities. To some extent, learning communities benefit each individual member and the community as a whole as they generate economic prosperity as well as improve students’ academic and social achievement. They even enhance interdisciplinary studies in higher education levels. Hence, it is of essence to have a strong learning community which requires all stakeholders to actively participate in sharing common values, beliefs, and knowledge in order to pass on their wisdom from generation to generation and embracing a strong sense of loyalty and belonging among themselves, so as to achieve together both individual needs and shared missions of the community. With the aim of sustaining a learning community, it necessitates synthesizing the creative mechanism of knowledge sharing with the application of authentic educational leadership that encompasses a process of influencing, sharing knowledge of new concepts, practices, ideas, insights, abilities, and values for personal development and of facilitating ongoing learning, communicating certain values and useful information for people’s well-being in a community, enhancing academic progress, and inculcating sound awareness of continuous lifelong education. The purposes of this study through content analysis are to raise the awareness of the eminent power of sharing knowledge that requires a strong sense of educational leadership and to emphasize the significance of sustaining learning communities for the academic achievement of learners in particular and for the intellectual well-being of people in a community in general.