Teachers’ professional learning online: expertise, identity, and judgement in social media spaces

Teachers’ professional learning is increasingly mediated through online and social media environments, creating new opportunities for connection, collaboration, and professional dialogue. At the same time, these spaces have become more complex and contested, shaped by platform affordances, monetisation, algorithmic curation, and the growing presence of artificial intelligence. This paper examines how teachers and teacher educators are making sense of social media-mediated professional learning within this changing landscape. Drawing on a recorded online seminar presented to the Australian Teacher Educators Association, the paper employs metalogue as an analytic method to interrogate dialogue among teacher educators and their peers. The metalogue functions as a reflexive and interpretive reconstruction that foregrounds tensions, uncertainties, and contested claims to expertise and professionalism. The paper explores how online professional learning is shaped by issues of identity, visibility, performativity, and professional judgement, as well as the implications of shifting platform cultures for teacher educators and pre-service teachers. By centring teacher educators’ perspectives and adopting a dialogic methodological approach, the paper contributes to understanding how professional learning online is navigated, interpreted, and modelled within teacher education. Suggesting that social media-mediated professional learning involves ongoing ethical discernment and reflexive judgement, not straightforward adoption or rejection of platforms or practices.