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

• From the perspective of knowledge sharing, this study investigates secondary schoolteachers’ cross-disciplinary collaboration and build a digital system to enhance teachers’ creativity that support their collaboration. • Secondary schoolteachers need digital support for tacit knowledge sharing to enhance creativity and STEAM implementation. • A digital community of practice that can support teachers’ cross-disciplinary collaboration needs to have three major components, the AI, the repository, and the communication. 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.