THE EFFECT OF TEACHER INSTRUCTIONS ON PRESERVICE TEACHER’S DEVELOPMENT OF PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

Trying to understand the knowledge base for teaching, the Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) was proposed as the main teacher’s knowledge. It amalgamates the specific knowledge and it is the difference between a teacher and a specialist. It can be both personal, deriving from practice, and canonical, which is cultural accumulation of what makes a good teacher. To acquire the last, preservice teachers (PSTE) take university classes, where theoretically their apprenticeship could be facilitated by the university teacher. Thus, it is important to understand how the university teacher best exerts his influence on PSTEs. In this paper, we show the impact of the university teacher’s interventions in the development of PCK based on analysis of a course taught to chemistry PSTE. The research was conducted in a qualitative approach, in a case study strategy. The classes from a chemistry teacher’s course from a federal university in São Paulo, Brazil were recorded for four months, to follow the development of the PCK. Qualitative forms of assessing the PCK, as CoRe, were used, and the tasks given by the teacher were collected to support the analysis. Our results show that the students’ knowledge integration responds to teacher interventions, particularly when those were customised to each individual. When the intervention was made by means of written exercises the influence on PSTE was lower than orally and when made by peers even lower or null. Being so, teacher’s interventions could be considered an INUS condition for the development of PCK in those students. Key words: knowledge integration, Pedagogical Content Knowledge, pre-service teacher, teacher formation.