When knowledge no longer has a single gateway
A teacher finishes her classes, grades a set of exams and, before closing her laptop, spends a few minutes looking for ideas for the following week. She opens LinkedIn, listens to a podcast while preparing dinner, saves a YouTube video on formative assessment and signs up for a free webinar advertised in a newsletter. The next day, she will discuss one of those resources with a colleague and perhaps adapt it for her own classroom.
Scenes like this are repeated every day in thousands of schools. Teachers’ continuing professional development no longer takes place exclusively through official courses, academic journals or pedagogical conferences. Those spaces remain important, but professional learning now also happens through much more flexible and everyday channels, where keeping up to date becomes part of teachers’ daily routines.
Until not so long ago, educational knowledge followed relatively well-defined paths. Universities produced research, education authorities organised continuing professional development, publishers produced teaching materials, and professional associations served as meeting points for educators. Access to new methodologies depended, to a large extent, on these intermediaries.
Today, that landscape has become far more complex. First the internet, and later digital platforms, multiplied the opportunities to access information, exchange experiences and build professional communities that extend beyond individual schools and even national borders. A teacher can attend a seminar organised in Finland, follow the recommendations of an Australian educator, participate in a discussion on artificial intelligence with colleagues from Latin America, or discover a reading comprehension strategy shared by a rural school in Spain.
Research has been documenting this transformation for years. Concepts such as networked professional learning explain how teachers build knowledge through distributed communities, where conversation, collaboration and the exchange of experiences are just as important as formal professional development. Professional affinity networks—from the early communities that emerged on Twitter to initiatives such as #ClaustroVirtual, specialised newsletters and thematic groups across different platforms—have expanded opportunities for peer learning and continuous professional updating.
The consequences extend far beyond the emergence of new communication channels. They also reshape the way professional authority is recognised. Universities, teacher education institutions and educational organisations remain essential points of reference, but they no longer occupy that position alone. Influence is increasingly built in the public conversation, where ideas circulate, are debated, tested in practice and embraced by communities willing to make them their own.
The New Curators of Educational Knowledge
The label eduinfluencers encompasses people engaged in a wide variety of activities: teachers who share classroom strategies with other educators; content creators who explain concepts directly to students; researchers and science communicators who make evidence accessible to non-specialist audiences; and organisations or communities that select, interpret and disseminate educational knowledge. They do not constitute a clearly defined academic category, but they occupy an increasingly visible position in the circulation of ideas about teaching.
Research has focused particularly on teachers who build large professional audiences through social media. In their article The Education Influencer: A New Player in the Educator Professional Landscape, Jeffrey Carpenter, Catharyn Shelton and Stephanie Schroeder define education influencers as educators who develop a personal brand, build sizeable communities and, in some cases, monetise their influence through teaching materials, courses or services. According to the authors, these individuals can shape the teaching practices, pedagogical beliefs and professional identities of those who follow them.
This definition sheds light on one part of the landscape, although it leaves out many actors who influence educational decision-making without fitting the commercial model typically associated with influencers. To better understand these figures, another concept used in the literature is particularly helpful: knowledge brokers.
Lucy Rycroft-Smith’s review describes knowledge brokerage as a form of mediation between research, educational practice and policy. Those who perform this role do more than simply disseminate studies; they translate, contextualise and connect knowledge produced by different communities. The author also highlights the importance of relationships, trust, and a deep understanding of both educational research and educational practice.
Universities, foundations, professional associations, specialised media outlets and public organisations have long acted as knowledge brokers. A study by Joel Malin, Chris Brown and Angela St Trubceac, for example, examined the work of Edutopia, The Marshall Memo and Usable Knowledge, three organisations that select and mobilise research to make it more accessible to education professionals.
Digital platforms have now expanded the number of people capable of performing a similar role. A teacher, a science communicator or an online community can select information, provide context and turn it into a recommendation that reaches thousands of educators. Not all of them sell content, monetise their work or seek public recognition. What they share is the ability to organise an ever-growing flow of information and help shape professional conversations and classroom practice. Educational authority therefore increasingly depends on those who can make knowledge understandable, relevant and useful.
Today, influence emerges from a combination of credibility, communication skills and visibility. Authority no longer resides solely with those who produce knowledge, but also with those who succeed in bringing that knowledge to an audience willing to listen, discuss it and put it into practice.
How Educational Authority Is Built Today
For much of the twentieth century, authority in education was built along relatively predictable paths. Research was published in academic journals, books established intellectual reputations, and conferences brought together specialists to debate new findings and advances. Teachers accessed this knowledge through continuing professional development, education authorities or specialised publications. Influence rested primarily on experience, scholarly output and institutional recognition.
That model has not disappeared, but it is no longer the only one. In today’s digital ecosystem, authority is also built through the ability to communicate. Explaining a complex concept clearly, summarising a research paper in a LinkedIn thread, turning an academic article into a podcast episode or responding to questions from a community of teachers are all ways of generating credibility that barely existed two decades ago.
Platforms have also introduced new rules of visibility. On social media, having knowledge is no longer enough. That knowledge must also be discoverable. Posting regularly, interacting with a community, choosing effective formats and maintaining an ongoing conversation all shape the reach of a message. As Carpenter, Shelton and Schroeder point out, educators with the greatest digital influence devote a significant part of their work to building relationships with their audiences and developing a recognisable professional identity—an effort that goes far beyond simply sharing content. This sustained presence helps consolidate their authority among those who follow them, regardless of whether or not they pursue a monetisation strategy.
These dynamics are reinforced by the role of algorithms. Platforms do not display all the information that is available; instead, they prioritise what they consider most relevant for each user. This selection influences which research findings, debates or educational experiences become visible and which remain unnoticed. As José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal have argued, digital platforms are not neutral channels of distribution. They organise and prioritise the circulation of knowledge according to criteria established by their own recommendation systems.
None of this means that scientific evidence has lost its value or that popularity has replaced rigour. Research remains the primary foundation of educational knowledge. What has changed is the path that knowledge takes before it reaches classrooms. Today, influence emerges from a combination of credibility, communication skills and visibility. Authority no longer resides solely with those who produce knowledge, but also with those who succeed in bringing that knowledge to an audience willing to listen, discuss it and put it into practice.
More Voices, Fewer Filters
The opening up of educational conversations has altered more than the volume of resources available. It has also transformed the mechanisms that once determined which knowledge reached teachers. Scientific journals, universities and official professional development programmes apply filters—peer review, editorial selection and academic standards—before ideas enter public circulation. On digital platforms, much of that filtering takes place after publication and is distributed among algorithms, recommendations, comments and individual choices. Teachers gain access to more voices, but they receive fewer initial guarantees about the quality of each one.
This transformation has allowed forms of knowledge that were previously marginalised to find an audience. Practical classroom expertise, which is often difficult to capture in academic publications, can now be shared, debated and enriched among peers. A study of self-organised teacher communities on Facebook found that most of the conversations analysed focused on questions, practical proposals and pedagogical content knowledge, suggesting that these spaces can function as genuine communities of professional learning.
Online networks also reduce professional isolation and provide valuable support, particularly when schools lack stable spaces for collaborative reflection. Reviews of professional learning communities associate this type of collaboration with improvements in pedagogical knowledge, professional identity and teachers’ sense of efficacy, while also noting that outcomes depend on factors such as context, available time and the quality of relationships among participants.
The same openness, however, blurs distinctions that remain important. A peer-reviewed research article, a teaching strategy that worked in one particular classroom and a confidently expressed opinion may all appear on the same screen with a similar appearance. Popularity signals circulation, not validity. Nor does it guarantee that a successful practice can be transferred to another grade level, subject area or education system. Even research on professional development has questioned how easily certain findings are turned into universal recipes on the basis of evidence that is often weaker than their presentation suggests. In an environment dominated by brief messages and rapid consumption, the conditions, limitations and uncertainties surrounding research tend to travel less effectively than its conclusions.
Knowledge brokerage itself is never a completely neutral process. Selecting a study, summarising it and turning it into a recommendation inevitably involves decisions about what to preserve, what to omit and how to frame the findings. In this regard, Lucy Rycroft-Smith’s review of knowledge brokers warns of the need to evaluate and hold accountable those who occupy these positions, since poor interpretation can lead to misinformation and potentially harmful consequences.
Commercial interests add another layer of complexity. Carpenter, Shelton and Schroeder show that some influential educators combine community building with the sale of teaching materials, courses and professional services. This does not invalidate the value of their contributions, but it does make it essential to distinguish clearly between shared experience, professional advice and commercial promotion. In this ecosystem, verifying, comparing and contextualising information are no longer tasks reserved for editors and institutions. They become part of teachers’ own professional and intellectual work. Educational conversations gain diversity and speed. In return, they demand a far more critical and discerning professional reading.
Influence No Longer Belongs to a Single Place
Educational institutions are no longer the only spaces where knowledge about education is interpreted, circulated and gains relevance.
Digital platforms have opened educational conversations to new actors and accelerated the exchange of experiences among teachers around the world. This transformation is unlikely to be reversed. The challenge now is to determine how to harness the potential of this new model of knowledge distribution without sacrificing rigour, context or critical thinking.
In this new landscape, eduinfluencers are only the most visible expression of a much broader phenomenon: the transformation of the channels through which educational knowledge is produced, shared and ultimately reaches classrooms. Understanding this shift is essential if we are to understand how teachers will continue to learn—and how they will continue to teach—in the years ahead.
