This paper aims to make a conceptual contribution to future research on teacher participation in professional development work. We combine insights from two different PhD-projects, investigating respectively the roles of specialized teachers and elected union representatives. The following research question guides the investigation:

How can teacher participation be conceptualized to analytically account for the involvement of and dynamics between professional communities, specialized teachers, and union representatives in professional development work?

We combine insights from the field of working life relations with the literature on specialized teacher roles. Due to the increased emphasis on the professionalization of the teaching profession in recent decades, teacher involvement has been increasingly recognized as a precondition for productive professional development work. By participating collectively in professional communities, the conditions for professional growth, teacher learning, and processes of change are improved. Today, there is extensive research on how teachers engage in professional development processes and what characterizes effective professional communities. The literature on teacher participation in professional development work, however, primarily focus on teachers collectively and less often accounts for the fact that many individual teachers hold positions in which they are particularly responsible for capacity building and/or facilitating professional development work. Analytical concepts addressing the interrelationship between the individual and the collective dimension thus seem to be needed. This article aims to accommodate this need.

We highlight the individual dimension by focusing on specialized teachers and teacher union representatives in the Nordic context, primarily by using examples from Norway. Taking the Nordic region as a point of departure is particularly interesting, as it provides distinct conditions both in terms of working life relations and the introduction of new teacher roles. First, the Nordic working life model is characterized by strong unions and institutionalized cooperation between employers and employees. According to the Basic Agreement regulating bilateral cooperation involving school leaders and union representatives in Norwegian schools, elected union representatives have the right and duty to participate in development processes and school improvement. This implies that the elected representatives of the teachers’ unions hold a dual role: They are protecting members’ interests when it comes to wages and working conditions, and advocates for professional interests and responsibilities related to professional practice. The latter part of the elected representatives’ responsibility, i.e. how they engage in school improvement and development processes, is rarely addressed in studies of professional development.

Second, new specialized teacher roles have been implemented in several Nordic countries over the last few decades—for example, teacher specialists (‘lærerspesialister’) in Norway and first teachers (‘förstelärare’) in Sweden—aiming to improve teaching and learning by leading development work and school improvement processes. Although such specialized teachers are not involved in issues related to wages and working conditions, their responsibilities overlap with those of the union representatives in the sense that they are both intended to engage in development processes. Despite this resemblance, few studies, if any, have explored how elected union representatives and specialized teachers jointly engage in teachers’ development work or how they interact within the professional community.

The co-existence of elected union representatives and specialized teachers requires not only empirical awareness of such roles when exploring teachers’ professional development work but also conceptual precision. Concepts and ideas shape and influence actors’ perceptions and actions. Analytical lenses accounting for the presence of various roles are thus arguably essential for improving our understanding of teachers’ participation in professional development work. This article addresses the conceptual requests by providing an analytical framework displaying how, specifically, different actors (i.e., teacher communities, specialized teachers, and elected teacher representatives) might participate and interact in professional development processes.

The paper is conceptual and builds on the understanding that concepts and ideas shape and influence actors’ perceptions and actions. The concepts we use thereby influence policy, practice and research. Drawing on previous research on specialized teachers and elected union representatives, we aim to develop a conceptual framework that enables a more nuanced discussion of actors and dynamics involved in professional development work. More specifically, we outline the conceptual distinction between collective, individual, and representative professional teacher participation. Our point of departure is Knudsen’s (1995) conceptualization of employee participation and Bie-Drivdal’s (2021) conceptualization of professional participation. Further, we relate the concepts to teacher participation and link individual professional participation to the role of specialized teachers (Lorentzen,2021). Moreover, we apply the three analytical concepts to develop empirical questions that can be used to investigate the individual and collective dimensions of teachers’ participation in future studies of development work. The analytical value of the suggested conceptual framework is demonstrated through the empirical questions. The questions display potential linkages between different forms of teacher participation in ways that reveal new possibilities for future research on teachers’ professional development.

The point of departure for this paper is the need to analytically account for the presence of new, specialized teacher roles and the role of elected union representatives when exploring teachers’ participation in professional development work – both empirically and conceptually. The main contrition of this article is the conceptual differentiation between representative, collective, and individual teacher participation. We also find that when these concepts are applied, new connections between these forms of participation are revealed. We illustrate how teachers in specific roles (i.e., specialized teachers and elected representatives) and teachers collectively (i.e., the professional community) can interact to take advantage of each other’s presence and jointly strengthen teachers’ participation in professional development processes. Examples of how connections between the different forms of participation can lead to unproductive dynamics will also be presented, implying that the process of linking representative, individual, and collective participation is not straightforward. Moreover, by highlighting the different, yet parallel, roles of specialized teachers and elected union representatives, we discuss the implications following the fact that one is selected based on expertise and the other is elected in a democratic process. The analytical value of our conceptual framework is demonstrated by showing how new questions arise when the framework is applied. In this sense, we have also addressed the abovementioned need to empirically account for specialized teachers and elected representatives by illustrating how these roles and teacher communities can be empirically taken into consideration in investigations of teachers’ participation in development work. The empirical questions are particularly relevant in studies conducted in the Nordic countries where teacher unions hold strong positions. However, the conceptual framework may also be fruitful in other contexts where specialized teachers and elected union representatives are expected to participate in school improvement and development work.

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