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The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the dominance of the participation metaphor for learning in the literature on learning organizations and to propose a working model of the teaching organization with conceptual input from educational science and the sociology of professions.

The paper combines theoretical critique and a selective review of literature that is relevant to the discussion of the concept “teaching organization”.

Concepts referring to teaching as a systemic attribute of learning organizations are not made explicit in texts on organizational learning and knowing. Key concepts from educational science are almost completely absent from this literature.

The paper describes elements from educational science and the sociology of professions and proposes to integrate them in a model of a teaching organization that could serve as a theoretical platform for further empirical studies.

How would a learning arena that promotes “just‐in‐time” learning in the workplace ideally be created? This was one of the most important questions the Norwegian research project, NEMLIG, aimed to illustrate through a series of work place experiments. The present article presents the evaluation of the project in the form of a number of dilemmas. These are clustered into three categories: those that related to present and future work organisation, those related to the user‐interface, and those dealing with user‐participation and systems development.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a theoretical platform for a design-based approach to entrepreneurship education grounded in the ideas of the Russian psychologist and linguist Lev S. Vygotsky by reconceptualising the development of entrepreneurial expertise as artefact-mediated activity. This model is elaborated into some core pedagogical principles and contrasted with other approaches to entrepreneurial education. It also describes the piloting of this design perspective in a Master of Science programme in entrepreneurship. Students working as interns in high-tech start-up companies reflected on their practice and learned to learn using a number of artefacts as “scaffolds”.

The empirical base of this paper is an instrumental case study of the pilot programme where the material is subject to documentary and narrative analysis. The master’s theses of the students participating in the new start-up programme were compared with those of students in the regular programme using thematic analysis.

The authors call for a more systematic examination of the model derived from Vygotsky in the field of entrepreneurship education. The exploratory study indicates that the emphasis on artefact-mediated action may strengthen systematic self-reflection and learning to learn among master’s students in practice-based programmes. However, Vygotsky’s focus on “distributed agency” should be complemented by a more personalized mentoring scheme.

This is a pioneering study examining the pedagogy of artefact mediation in entrepreneurship education.