Teachers who are able to support complex systems of learning with nuance and expertise are an integral factor of student learning (Darling-Hammond, 2016; Özer, B., Can, T., & Duran, V., 2020). Yet, in too many countries, solutions for ensuring high-quality student learning are shifting toward a technorational view that attempts to simplify complex systems of learning and replace them with simplified “teacher proof” practices that are defined at a policy level (Dadvand, Ryan, & Murphy, 2025). As teachers engage in their central work of teaching students, they are being increasingly inundated with bureaucratic requirements that center proving their worth through the use of data in ways that strip detailed tapestries of student learning and reduce them into little more than the most general of outlines (McCarthy, Riddle, & Hickey, 2025). This is a form of knowledge creation that locks teachers into a “performative agenda” that does benefit the students it is purportedly meant to serve. Here, knowledge is being “created” in a way that decenters teachers and students and replaces them with nameless, faceless claims that highlight their failures while offering only very few pragmatic solutions that are contextually relevant to local learning spaces.

We can’t help but contrast this stripped, simplified, and depersonalized version of teaching and learning with research about exemplary learning contexts that emphasize how knowledge across domains “is subject to the professional identities of their ‘owners’” (Hameyer, 2007) and learning theories that emphasize the importance of “build[ing] on the situated nature of learning, emphasising the value of learning through ‘doing’ in the company of others and acknowledg[ing] both the socio-cultural and socio-material nature of learning,” (Carvalho & Yeoman, p. 1122). These versions of learning are complex and difficult to enact. They require continued teacher learning and critical reflection throughout a teacher’s career. They center the teacher and student in the learning process rather than trying to remove or mitigate their impact.

As pre-service teachers are prepared to enter this complex and contradictory system, they are too often faced with the abrasive realities of teaching without having access to contexts where teachers are engaged in creative processes of mitigating the negative impacts of these tensions. One veteran teacher described her concern for pre-service teachers who were entering schools and were, “just get[ting] schooled in how school is…like the culture of school and it really takes some of the joy out of teaching,” (Adeyemi, Pratt, & Stanton, 2025). Field experiences offer an important context for new teacher learning and they must pair these with intentional introductions to the creative, constructive, and sometimes subversive work that teachers do to meet the needs of their students despite the challenges they face.

In this study, we look at one example of this work by examining the experiences of a group of teachers, who have been working to reshape and reimagine their own understandings of teaching and learning. By coming together, they have engaged in a process of knowledge creation as they co-construct pedagogical strategies to address instructional dilemmas they face in their own classrooms. We also examine their process of inviting pre-service teachers to participate in this space, as an opportunity for considering the fabric of possibility in the context of school.

Research Questions:

1. How do teachers describe their experiences of collaborative knowledge construction?

1. In what ways are teachers using the process of knowledge construction as a mechanism for teacher learning?

2. How does a community for teacher inquiry inform the teacher learning of teacher educators and pre-service teachers who are connected to the community?

3. What are the systems that have sustained this community for teacher inquiry over time?

This qualitative case study examines the experiences of knowledge creation co-constructed by a coalition of teachers, all sharing a connection to one teacher preparation program (as former students and/or Mentor Teachers), who shared the aim of enhancing their teaching practice and elevating the real-world applications of their students’ learning. The participants were a group of 20 teachers and teacher educators, all working in an informal network of public schools in partnership with one local university in a large north-eastern city in the United States. At the time of the study, the coalition had existed in varying forms for nearly 9 years. Teachers used this space to ask questions, pose dilemmas, and engage in experimental teaching practices that were then taken back to schools to be applied in for formal classroom contexts. Data Collection In previous projects, over 8 years we collected a range of documents (e.g., student journals, meeting notes, correspondence, workshopping posters, individual interviews) that also act as longitudinal sources of data for this study. Additional data for this project includes a set of two focus groups meant to explore the theoretical and practical elements of this group’s work. The first focus group centers on the idea of knowledge creation and the group’s experience engaging with pedagogical dilemmas and developing professional processes of inquiry as a community to interrogate them. The second uses a narrative storytelling method to explore experiential (what did we do?) and emotional (how did it feel?) elements of this work. Data Analysis Analysis for this study utilizes a multi-layered method. This includes a preliminary chronological sequencing of data chronologically to develop a “storyboard” that offers insights into teacher learning and how concepts of knowledge creation and co-constructed change over time. Transcript elements are layered onto this using the second focus group and matching this storytelling narrative to our sequenced storyboard. We will next use a cycle of process coding to describe changes and consider how “actions intertwined with the dynamics of time,” (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014). Finally, to explore connections between actions and motive/intent/motivation, we will add an additional layer of coding that focuses on values, attitudes, and beliefs of the participants (Saldana & Masta, 2018). This cycle of thematic coding offers insight into how social interactions affected ways that participants engaged in their professional practice as we think about the nature of the community or ecosystem is being collaboratively constructed.

Our preliminary results offer an illustration of ways in which a few simple actions can result in the development of complex and vibrant systems. Members of the coalition joined this group through word-of-mouth and because colleagues were having positive experiences. The growth was organic as one person would bring another. Teachers talked about having “an outlet where [I] felt like I could do the type of teaching and learning that I was hoping to” and “being excited about being a part” of the community that was forming. This energy seems to have been reinforced through community norms and structures such as open meeting times where the agenda was co-constructed and that happened in-person and a fluidity of membership where teachers would take a break at pivotal moments when they had less bandwidth (e.g., taking a year off while buying a house, having a child, or getting married) and then would reenter the community and continue to contribute. Within the space, our preliminary data indicates a process where identifying dilemmas (e.g., my school won’t let me do that), asking questions (e.g., but what does that actually look like in teaching practice?), and experimentation (e.g., well let’s try that with some students and see what happens) formed the basic structure that defined the work of the group. Our preliminary data shows an iterative cycle that offered an open structure of inquiry-based teacher learning that ultimately came to also impact student, pre-service teacher, and teacher educator learning as the structures of the community became continuously more complex in terms of membership while also maintaining a simple structure for engaging in pedagogical inquiry.

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