Investigating School Leadership Practice: A Distributed Perspective

uted through the environments ’ material and cultural artifacts and through other people in collaborative efforts to complete complex tasks (Latour, 1987; Pea, 1993). For example, Hutchins (1995a) docu-ments how the task of landing a plane can be best understood through investigating a unit of analysis that includes the pilot, the manufactured tools, and the social context. In this case, the tools and social context are not merely “aides ” to the pilot’s cognition but rather essential features of a composite. Similarly, tools such as calculators enable students to complete computational tasks in ways that would be distinctly different if the calculators were absent (Pea, 1993). In these cases, cognitive activity is “stretched over” actors and artifacts. Hence, human activity is best understood by considering both arti-facts and actors together through cycles of task completion because the artifacts and ac-tors are essentially intertwined in action contexts (Lave, 1988). In addition to material tools, action is distributed across language, theories of ac-tion, and interpretive schema, providing the “mediational means ” that enable and transform intelligent social activity (Brown