Teacher professional development through Knotworking: facilitating transformational agency through collaboration to overcome constraints to teaching in relation to disruptive events

Abstract

ABSTRACT Teachers face numerous challenges in their efforts to be pedagogically responsive to students’ different learning needs. I extend scholarship in the field by exploring the potential of implementing a nuanced, collaborative intervention strategy called knotworking to facilitate teachers’ ongoing professional development (PD). The heuristic of knotworking builds on Cultural Historical Activity Theory which takes historically formed systemic contradiction as the central unit of analysis. Knotworking is a collaborative model where participants address contradictions in their work environment to overcome the fragmentation of the object. By engaging in ‘knots,’ participants seek ways to combine their expertise around a central problem or contradiction. Qualitative data, generated from recordings of teachers participating in a series of ongoing knotworking interventions, showed that these collaborative events supported PD, as most of the teachers were able to identify complex problems constraining their teaching and, from this, generate new knowledge and deepen their understanding of how to be pedagogically responsive to the different needs of their learners. Implications are considered for using knotworking as a strategy to support PD initiatives in complex contexts, where finding solutions to problems is often elusive.