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To what extent can teachers' involvement in knowledge-producing activities be enhanced through collaboration with researchers? This article reports on two teacher-researcher collaborative didactic development projects in Sweden and Finland. By using the theory of practice architectures, the aim is to explore how teachers' knowledge contribution and participation may be transformed through collaboration in two action research-based projects. Even though the practices of collaboration are different, one aiming for book production and the other for didactic development in the classroom, the findings regarding the teachers' professional transformation seem to have similarities. The norms of how teachers initially understand themselves are transformed through the collaboration. The teachers start out by stating that they feel unsure of their own capacity, but through collaboration they start to see themselves as knowledge producers when they understand the value of their contribution of knowing-in-action. The teachers' professional transformation is made possible through time given and the set-up of collaboration through dialogues. As the teachers develop agency in the collaborative process of producing knowledge with the researchers, the relationships of power and solidarity change. The findings contribute to the research field emphasising teachers' important role in knowledge production and practice development processes.

During the last decade, Finnish teacher education (TE) has received special interest due to the Finnish students' success in PISA. Although TE in Finland has many strengths, there are also challenges that need to be addressed. One of the main challenges is the relation between theory and practice. As action research (AR) has been suggested as one possible tool for bridging the theory-practice gap and simultaneously supporting the forming of the foundational steps for an inquiry stance to continue through the teaching career, an AR orientation in the pre-service stages is of particular interest in this study. The aim is to explore student teachers' (STs') experiences of AR-based projects within two different contexts of Finnish TE, characterized by various paradigms: a class and a subject TE programme. The analysis revealed experiences of both constraints and affordances. Some of these are identified among both groups of STs, albeit somewhat differently characterized in the two contexts, while others are context specific. The results show that both groups of STs value their experiences of the AR-based projects. However, the results give important insights into STs' experiences of both constraints and affordances that merit further consideration when implementing AR-based projects within pre-service TE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]