Readdressing Situational Leadership in the New World Order through Technology

Abstract

E-learning provides a unique opportunity to reach people across the globe in the most remote locations, such as the Indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest, the focus of our work. We take into consideration teams as learners within the technological context of Mindfulness into Action (MIA) e-learning platform to build upon relationships for sustainability of cultural Indigenous knowledge. The MIA platform goes beyond traditional paradigms and includes the support of Talent Jungle, a program that believes in everyone's uniqueness. Imparting knowledge is not the privilege of professionals, a westernized worldview, but is an inherent right of everyone. The Indigenous people of the Amazon have much to contribute to the western worldview by way of Indigenous natural medicine within their knowledge. Here we are readdressing situational leadership by reconceptualizing leadership skills development in a methodology that emphasizes the importance of social exchange without leaders or followers through technology educational space. By using media to facilitate interdisciplinary research in various fields, MIA is using Indigenous knowledge to take action to protect in the Amazon rainforest. The idea of using Indigenous knowledge is not new. The work of Bates, Chiba, Kube, and Nakashima (2009) states that Indigenous people have a broad knowledge of how to live sustainably. In her work of western-lead teams of researchers, Louise Grenier (1998) found that their development efforts usually fail to attain their objective because they did not take in account local technologies, local systems of knowledge, and the local environment. In order to address this situation, in this chapter we are suggesting to include Indigenous practices in training future research students.