Professional development is currently seen as a ticket to change, as teachers depend on professional growth to cope with their challenges as knowledge workers (Little, 2011). As Edwards, Gilroy and Hartley (2002) show, the traditional school disciplines are challenged by the increasing turnover rate of knowledge production, and the need for teachers to be socialized into future practices.  In the knowledge society (Castells, 1996) teachers are not merely expected to be subject experts, they also need to develop new knowledge; increasingly they have to work at the periphery of their horizon of professionalism. This entails making sense of an expanding volume of information and moving across knowledge domains in order to adapt to changing needs (Engeström, 2004). The present paper aims to show how teachers seek to expand their knowledge base by examining processes of knowledge creation among an interdisciplinary group of 11 teachers in a Norwegian upper secondary school who collaborated in order to develop knowledge about writing in and across school subjects. The research question is: How do cross-disciplinary talk stimulate knowledge creation processes in a team of teachers? To capture such processes in the team of teachers we turn to Paavola and Hakkarainen’s notion of the knowledge creating metaphor (2005). In essence, this approach concentrates on mediated processes involving shared artifacts and objects. The study explores knowledge creation that took place within the learning community to expose how professional knowledge emerges over time and by juxtaposing professional development, mediation and the use of artifacts. As the participants worked with the writing of argumentative texts in diverse subjects the use of sources in student texts emerged as a common denominator. For Norwegian learners, accountable use of sources in students’ texts has emerged as a crucial competence within the curriculum. Thus, several teachers expressed uncertainty of this matter and the need for common guidelines that would assist them in their teaching. The teachers seek to develop their practices in a situation where practices differ. As researchers we could follow this work over time where drafts of guidelines were negotiated, revised or rejected before the group settled on a template applicable for all subjects.However, not all teachers feel comfortable teaching learners how to develop such competence. Moreover, developing interdisciplinary knowledge is a complex endeavor because it involves teachers traversing the boundaries between the school subjects they teach. However, traversing boundaries is necessary in order to expand the object and develop relational expertise (Edwards, 2005). In this situation we see how the teachers turn to each other for advice, often mediated by learners’ texts, expertise within the group, or concepts from their profession.

The analytical framework of this study is grounded in a social-cultural perspective and inspired by Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) (Engeström, 2004). This approach provides an opportunity to study in depth how teachers frame and respond to challenges and the ways in which solutions to problems become constituted in the interplay of individuals, purposes, and various tools in the context of their work. With its foundations in the Vygotskyan tradition of language as mediating thinking and activity theory’s focus on shared artifacts as vehicles for mental development the knowledge creation metaphor functions as an analytical lens when we turn to the empirical material.

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