Teachers’ professional development increasingly takes place within diverse professional networks that go beyond individual schools, organizational charts, and national borders. At the same time, teachers are expected not only to implement educational reforms but also to actively shape pedagogical methods, especially amid the ongoing digital transformation (Roumbanis Viberg et al., 2021; Van Der Heijden et al., 2015). These demands highlight the crucial role of teachers’ agency, which is their ability to initiate, justify, and collaboratively promote changes in educational practices (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Schatzki, 2002). Although professional networks are widely seen as key sources for professional growth and innovation, there is less understanding of how teachers perceive these multi-level networks as resources for fostering their transformative professional agency.

This research examines how teachers perceive their professional networks shaping their transformative professional agency in the context of digitalization. It is grounded in the concept of transformative professional agency (Korhonen et al., 2024; Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017; Reinius et al., 2022; Stetsenko, 2016), which views agency as future-focused, collective, and aimed at changing practices rather than merely adapting to existing ones. The study also draws on sociocultural perspectives (Eteläpelto et al., 2013) on professional learning, knowledge creation, and communities of practice (Wenger, 1999), highlighting that social interactions, tools, and organizational contexts shape professional agency. In this view, professional networks serve as dynamic spaces for collective sense-making, identity work, and knowledge development, which can either facilitate or limit teachers’ ability to innovate and develop their practices.

The study utilizes a qualitative, multi-modal research approach within the Finnish context of the Learning and Teaching in Digital Environments Professional Specialization Program (DigiErko). It involves 12 teachers who have completed the program and are actively involved in digital pedagogical development. Data collection includes semi-structured interviews and ego-centered professional network maps focused on teachers’ digital pedagogical activities. The maps served as elicitation tools during the interviews, helping participants reflect on their professional networks and their roles within them.

The data analysis combines qualitative content analysis of interview data with a systematic visual examination of network maps. By merging interview stories with visual data, the study offers a detailed understanding of how teachers view their professional networks and how these networks influence their sense of transformative professional agency.

The findings indicate that teachers’ professional networks consist of multi-level, overlapping ecosystems rather than isolated or linear structures. Teachers describe these networks as ranging from close, school-based collaborations to broader national, digital, and international professional communities. In these various contexts, professional networks enhance transformative professional agency in multiple interconnected ways. They reduce the barriers to experimentation and pedagogical risk-taking by providing safe spaces for dialogue, shared problem-solving, and mutual learning from experiences. Additionally, networks serve as sources of inspiration and innovation, providing access to new ideas, tools, and practices that can be tailored to local settings. Participation in these networks also helps legitimize teachers’ roles in professional development, boosting their professional identity and credibility when leading pedagogical change in schools. Lastly, networks facilitate collective knowledge creation and dissemination, positioning teachers as brokers, mentors, and facilitators whose influence reaches beyond their classrooms.

The study advances research on teacher agency by framing transformative professional agency as relational and distributed within networked contexts. In practice, the results indicate that professional networks need to be intentionally designed, acknowledged, and supported as essential infrastructure for sustained, teacher-led educational change in increasingly digital learning environments.

The study adopts a qualitative research design complemented by a structured visual elicitation task. The research context is the Learning and Teaching in Digital Environments Professional Specialization Program (DigiErko), a Finnish program designed to strengthen teachers’ digital pedagogical competence and their capacity to act as developers of educational practice. The participants are 12 teachers from diverse educational settings who have completed the program and are actively involved in digital pedagogical development. The data comprises two interrelated components: semi-structured interviews and ego-centered professional network maps. Before the interviews, participants completed an ego-centered network mapping task using a standardized template and written instructions. Teachers were asked to visually map people, groups, and organizations that supported or influenced their digital pedagogical development. Participants placed themselves at the center of the map and arranged network actors by perceived importance and interaction frequency. The mapping task was completed independently before the research interaction to ensure that the representations reflected participants’ own understandings of their professional networks rather than being shaped by the interview situation. Following the mapping task, qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews. During the interviews, participants were invited to describe and reflect on their network maps, discuss their experiences with professional networking, and explain how different network relationships supported or challenged their development work. The interviews focused on teachers’ experiences of agency, collaboration, and pedagogical change within and across network contexts, particularly in relation to digitalization. The analysis combines qualitative content analysis of interview transcripts with a systematic visual analysis of the network maps. Interview data were analyzed iteratively to identify recurring themes related to professional networks and transformative professional agency. The visual analysis focused on structural and relational features of the network maps, including network levels (school-based, municipal, national, digital, international), central and peripheral actors, boundary-crossing connections, and the teacher’s position within the network. Selected features were compared across participants to identify shared patterns and variations. This qualitatively driven, multi-modal approach enables an in-depth examination of how teachers conceptualize their professional networks and how these networks serve as resources for developing transformative professional agency.

This study demonstrates that teachers’ professional networks play a central role in fostering transformative professional agency in the context of digital pedagogical change. Rather than functioning as isolated or supplementary structures, professional networks form multi-level, overlapping ecosystems that shape teachers’ opportunities to initiate, justify, and lead pedagogical development. The findings highlight that professional networks support transformative professional agency in several interconnected ways. Networks lower the threshold for experimentation by providing psychologically safe spaces for dialogue, shared problem-solving, and learning from peers’ experiences. They also serve as sources of inspiration and innovation, enabling access to new ideas, tools, and practices that extend beyond local school contexts. Importantly, participation in professional networks contributes to the legitimation of teachers’ developer roles, strengthening professional identity and credibility when leading change initiatives within schools. Through network-based roles such as brokers, mentors, and trainers, teachers can extend their influence beyond their own classrooms and contribute to collective knowledge creation. The study contributes theoretically by reinforcing a relational and sociocultural understanding of teachers’ transformative professional agency as distributed across networked contexts rather than confined to individual teachers. Agency emerges through interaction, shared practices, and boundary-crossing connections that enable future-oriented action. From a practical perspective, the findings suggest that educational organizations and policymakers should more explicitly recognize and support teachers’ network-based work as a core component of professional development and school improvement. Intentionally designed and sustained professional networks may serve as critical infrastructure for fostering teacher-led, sustainable educational change in digitally evolving learning environments.

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