Sustainability of knotworking as a teacher professional development strategy

Abstract

Teachers are faced with emerging and often complex constraints that can impact their ability to be
pedagogically responsive to learners’ different needs. These constraints or challenges were compounded by the
COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, I extend scholarship in the field of teacher professional development by exploring
the potential of implementing a nuanced form of collaborative intervention strategy called knotworking. There is
a growing literature, some of which is discussed in this paper, on the utilisation of cultural historical activity
theory-based constructs, which include Engeström’s (2000a, 2001) knotworking heuristic, to manage the
complex, value-based problems that teachers and school leaders are confronted with daily. This paper is a
follow-up study that reported on a year-long knotworking intervention at a primary school in Johannesburg. The
findings from the initial project (Andrews, 2024) showed that teachers were able to identify complex problems
constraining their teaching and, through collaboration, generate new knowledge and teaching methods and
deepen their understanding of how to be pedagogically responsive to the different learning needs of their
children. In this follow-up paper, the participants in the initial knotworking intervention were interviewed to
explore whether the new knowledge or practices they identified and implemented in the classroom had been
sustained a year later. Findings from the qualitative data generated from the semi-structured interviews with the
teachers show that much of the new knowledge, which included teaching practices, classroom management
plans, or learner interventions that emanated from the knotworking interventions were still in use a year later
and, in some instances, were integrated into internal operational policies.