Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Abstract

At the October 2012 PCK Summit in Colorado Springs, USA, a group of international scholars met to share definitions, applications, and interpretations of the construct of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The following description was proposed by one of the discussion groups and adopted by consensus: PCK is “defined as a personal attribute of a teacher and is considered both a knowledge base and an action . . . [It is the] knowledge of, reasoning behind, planning for, and enactment of teaching a particular topic in a particular way for a particular reason to particular students for enhanced student outcomes” (Gess-Newsome and Carlson 2013). The four times that the word “particular” appears in this definition is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it means that PCK must be reconstructed specifically each time a given teacher, within set objectives, has to present a certain topic to a specific set of students with a distinctive background and learning characteristics. On the other hand, it represents a superb challenge, being that PCK is an academic construct that represents an intriguing idea, rooted in the belief that teaching requires much more than delivering content knowledge to students, involving designed purposes and the best ways to represent and evaluate that knowledge. PCK has been a field within which much science education research has been conducted. The array of publications range from Gess-Newsome and Lederman’s (1999) book that combined several visions of PCK, looking at ways of assessing and measuring the construct and its impact on science teacher education programs, to the Kind (2009) extended paper where an analysis of PCK models was conducted alongside an examination of methods of elucidating PCK in experienced and novice teachers. The idea of PCK is enticing because it seems to be such a clever way of imagining what the specialist knowledge of teaching might involve. PCK is complex and usually so deeply a part of a teacher’s intrinsic practice that it is tacit and, more often than not, largely inaccessible. The difficulties allied to making more use of PCK lie in its elusive nature. PCK conjures up an image of cutting-edge knowledge of practice, something special and important, something that could define expertise, something that could illustrate, in a meaningful way, why teaching needed to be better understood and more highly valued. PCK is the knowledge and beliefs that teachers develop, over time and through experience, about how to teach particular content in particular ways in order to enhance student understanding. The term PCK was first coined by Lee Shulman three decades ago. Reflecting on his original lecture entitled “The Missing Paradigm in Research on Teaching” (presented at the University of Texas at Austin, summer 1983), he commented that “most [people] were shocked when I declared that the missing paradigmwas the study of subject-matter content and its interaction with pedagogy” (Gess-Newsome and Lederman 1999, forward). In an elaboration of his original concept, Shulman