A Bangla saying suggests that when people work together they enjoy the wisdom of engagement irrespective of the extent of accomplishment and final outcomes. This paper reports the development of a learning community of teachers in a rural Bangladeshi secondary school. While the project considered the wider context of current social and educational development within Bangladesh, it worked within the tension between external influences and the real needs of teachers, students and local community. In terms of educational outcomes, the rural schools are far behind than the urban schools. Moreover, existing professional development programmes and in-service teacher training are centrally developed and top-down and do not fully align with the rural teacher’s needs. Thus there is a need for alternative processes that might better meet the educational needs of a rural community. The project developed a learning community among the teachers to collaboratively examine existing teaching practices and existing and shifting understandings of their role as teachers. Through our work we created a communicative and exploratory space. The teachers, individually and in various forms of collaboration, examined their teaching intentions, built on and successively critiqued aspects of their practice, stepped outside their normal protocols to actively dialogue with students about their needs, investigated their own knowledge and capabilities and recognised gaps, successively refined their aims, and implemented change in their practice. In this way, they developed their own locally grounded understandings of teaching. A most significant observable outcome of the project was the sustenance of the teachers’ commitment for over six months, despite already full workloads, and despite the challenges, and occasional pain , emotionally and conceptually. Their commitment gave rise to a practice of sharing and exchanging. Beneath these observable outcomes were less overtly visible shifts, including the gradual surrender of aspects of a role they had thought they had to act out, that of being the authority and expert in their classrooms, and beginning to explore other possibilities. As a doctoral student I have been part of learning community that allowed me explore dissonances between academic theorisations and my own experiential understandings, challenged me to deconstruct my assumptions and provoked me to think otherwise. Sitting in the hot seat, I presented parts of my fieldwork to colleagues from my home country and others. I not only refined my emerging understandings, but I also gained experiential insight into how the challenges in the project must have affected the teachers.

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