What happens when teaching contexts collapse? Evidence for creativity and community as contextual capabilities

Educational research often treats context as a static background, yet modern higher education faces persistent “context collapse” driven by generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) and global instability. This study reframes context as an enacted capability, a dynamic process of navigation rather than a setting. We investigate how educators mobilise contextual knowledge (XK) into practice during radical disruption and identify the specific mechanisms that facilitate this translation.Using a qualitative approach, we interviewed 27 educators at 3 institutions in the UK and China. The technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) framework was applied to analyse how participants operationalised technology integration and XK when institutional stability became unreliable.Our analysis reveals that while TPACK domains provided the necessary foundations, successful adaptation depended on two contextual mechanisms: pedagogic creativity (enacted through brainstorming, experimentation, iteration and risk-taking) and teaching communities (which facilitated rapid knowledge exchange and psychological safety). These are not merely external supports but are the situated expressions of XK that allow educators to transform constraints into workable pedagogical practice.This paper contributes a new theoretical refinement to the TPACK + XK framework by clarifying the boundary between “having” XK and “enacting” it. For academic developers, this suggests moving beyond technical training toward systematically building educators' creative confidence and collaborative capacity, recognising that teaching increasingly requires not mastery of stable knowledge but the capability to navigate instability itself.