Professional learning is critical to schools' sustainable improvement. Individual teachers' capacities and funds of knowl- edge are significant sources for professional learning.Pooling teachers' expertise and strength through both formal and informal structures helps capitalize on the human capital within schools and maximize opportunities for teacher profes- sional learning (Hargreaves, 2001; Harris, 2003). Current profes- sional learning literature has attested to the power of co-learning for teacher professional growth (Avalos, 2011; Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008). Co-learning is found to be an important condition for effective professional development in that it promotes the deprivatization of practices and fosters collaborative critical reflection over daily teaching practices and collaborative sharing, which facilitates the grasp of professional knowledge (Levine & Marcus, 2010; Postholm, 2012). Thus, nurturing school cultures that promote mutual learning are beneficial to teacher individual and collective capacity building.Co-learning could take place via formal structures, such as professional learning communities and lesson study, and via informal venues, such as collegial informal exchanges and in- teractions (Avalos, 2011; Jurasaite-Harbison & Rex, 2010). Frost (2012) proposed the concept of non-positional teacher leadership to maximize both venues of co-learning. Non-positional teacher leadership refers to the process where individual teachers, regardless of formal positions and designations, contribute to, individually and collectively, the remaking of school practices through influencing others (Frost, 2012; Harris, 2003; York-Barr & Duke, 2004). Thus, it could marshal resources and mobilize the intellectual capital throughout the schools, to the maximum, for teacher individual and collective growth (Hargreaves, 2001; York- Barr & Duke, 2004). In the context of cross-cultural teaching, the reciprocity of non-positional teacher leadership across different cultural groups is particularly needed to help mobilize the cultural capital at schools (Bovill et al., 2015). As non-positional teacher leadership requests active involvement of individual teachers, empowerment and agency are the two pillars (Harris, 2003). Whether teachers' intellectual and cultural capitals could be maximally harnessed to benefit professional learning depends critically on the school cultures, structures and capacity building mechanisms that could empower teachers to exert agency to lead and to learn (Frost, 2012; Jurasaite-Harbison & Rex, 2010; York-Barr & Duke, 2004).1.2. Theoretical framework
Agency is an important concept in the academic discussion of professional learning in the workplace. Professional learning is a constructive process, and agency is needed to drive the construc- tion and reconstruction of one's professional knowledge, compe- tencies and identities and to influence and transform work practices (Billett, 2011; Etel ̈apelto, V ̈ah ̈asantanen, H ̈okk ̈a, & Paloniemi, 2014; V ̈ah ̈asantanen, 2015). Etel ̈apelto, V ̈ah ̈asantanen, H ̈okk ̈a, and Paloniemi (2013) defined professional agency as the practices where “professional subjects and/or communities exert influence, make choices and take stances in ways that affect their work and/or their professional identities” (p. 61).
Unlike the individualistic views that define agency as a set of context-free individual capacities and efficacies to act upon the world or the social deterministic views that define agency as totally bounded and constrained by the cultural systems and social structures (Etel ̈apelto et al., 2013; Priestley, Edwards, Priestley, & Miller, 2012), current conceptualizations of agency highlight the interdependency between agency and structure. Human agency is
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