Sustainability of knotworking as a teacher professional development strategy

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.