Understanding teachers' cross-disciplinary collaboration for STEAM education: Building a digital community of practice

While creativity was previously considered a specialised ability, over the last 20 years creativity has been reframed as an open set of creative thinking skills and knowledge practices that all teachers can develop through a cross-disciplinary pedagogical approach. STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) has emerged as a cross-disciplinary learning model which explicitly aims to develop creative thinking skills across and through the disciplines. However, teachers’ lack of tacit knowledge in cross-disciplinary collaboration has created challenges and made it hard to implement STEAM in schools. Inspired by the approach of knowledge management, also known as Community of Practice (CoP), and how industries facilitate tacit knowledge propagation across departments to promote creativity through digital support, this article investigates how a Digital-CoP system may potentially support teachers’ cross-disciplinary collaboration. This paper prototypes a Digital CoP System for real world teachers to evaluate. It uses a mixed methods approach to understand teachers’ cross-disciplinary collaboration perception through a Digital-CoP System from the knowledge propagation perspective and points out the further enhancement of the Digital-CoP System enabling it to promote teachers' cross-disciplinary collaboration across Arts and STEM.