Resolving the amalgam: connecting pedagogical content knowledge,content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge

ABSTRACT

This paper concludes the Special Issue (SI) ‘Probing the Amalgam: the relationship between science teachers’ content, pedagogical and pedagogical content knowledge’. We review the five papers (Sorge et al; Gess-Newsome et al; Kind; Pitjeng-Mosabala and Rollnick; and Liepertz and Bronowski) by discussing evidence these present regarding the relationships between content knowledge (CK), pedagogical knowledge (PK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK); the development of CK, PK and PCK in novice and experienced secondary science teachers and how CK, PK and/or PCK impact students’ learning. In conclusion, we draw these findings together in offering proposals for future research via reconsideration of Shulman’s amalgam. This includes post-hoc examination of a PCK model known as ‘the Consensus Model’ (Gess-Newsome, [2015]. A model of teacher professional knowledge and skill including PCK: Results of the thinking from the PCK Summit. In A. Berry, P. J. Friedrichsen, & J. Loughran (Eds.), Re-examining Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Science Education (pp. 28–42). New York, NY: Routledge; Neumann, Kind, & Harms [2018]. Probing the amalgam: The relationship between science teachers’ content, pedagogical and pedagogical content knowledge. International Journal of Science Education, 1–15) and presentation of a novel PCK structure based on evidence from the SI studies.     

浅谈美术专业师范生色彩教学能力的培养

美术专业师范生的色彩教学能力影响着未来中小学素质教育的改革和发展。本文通过对美术专业师范生在实习中色彩教学能力的实际调查,提出对美术类师范生色彩教学能力培养的对策。这对促进高校艺术教学能力的发展和师范生素质教育来说,都有着十分重要的现实意义。     

Probing the amalgam: the relationship between science teachers’ content,pedagogical and pedagogical content knowledge

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue aims to present evidence about the relationships between content knowledge (CK), pedagogical knowledge (PK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK); the development of these types of knowledge in novice and experienced secondary science teachers; and how CK, PK and/or PCK impact students’ learning. Since Shulman’s introduction of PCK as the feature that distinguishes the teacher from the content expert, researchers have attempted to understand, delineate, assess and/or develop the construct in pre- and in-service teachers. Accordingly, empirical findings are presented that permit further discussion. Outcomes permit post-hoc examination of a recent, collectively described, ‘consensus’ model of PCK, identifying strengths and potential issues. As we will illustrate, the relationship between CK, PK and PCK is central to this; that is, probing the hypothesis of pedagogical content knowledge as an ‘amalgam’ of content and pedagogical knowledge.     

Teacher pedagogical constructions: a reconfiguration of pedagogical content knowledge

A brief review of the history of pedagogical content knowledge reveals various definitions and conceptualizations of the construct, as well as some conceptual problems. A new conceptualization—teacher pedagogical constructions—is offered to address some of the problems associated with PCK. Seven assertions that comprise the new conceptualization are presented, explained and defended. These are: (1) PCK represents personal and private knowledge; (2) PCK is a collection of basic units called teacher pedagogical constructions; (3) teacher pedagogical constructions result mainly from planning, but also from the interactive and post‐active phases of teaching; (4) pedagogical constructions result from an inventive process that is influenced by the interaction of knowledge and beliefs from different categories; (5) pedagogical constructions constitute both a generalized event‐based and a story‐based kind of memory; (6) pedagogical constructions are topic specific; and (7) pedagogical constructions are (or should ideally be) labeled in multiple interesting ways that connect them to other categories and subcategories of teacher knowledge and beliefs. The proposed definition results from a reconceptualization of the nature of PCK as originally proposed, taking the results of major later studies and conceptualizations of PCK into consideration, appropriating new ideas about the structure of memory, and undertaking a reanalysis and presentation of data from a previous study. The article calls for viewing PCK as neither a subcategory of subject matter (subject matter knowledge for teaching) nor as a general generic form of knowledge. It presents a view of PCK as a collection of teacher professional constructions, as a form of knowledge that preserves the planning and wisdom of practice that the teacher acquires when repeatedly teaching a certain topic. Viewing PCK as a collection of TPCs, more precisely defining it, clarifying its relations to other knowledge and beliefs entities, and speculating about its development should facilitate future investigations of PCK.     

Anarchist education and the paradox of pedagogical authority

This article interrogates a key feature of anarchist education; focusing on a problem with implications not only for anarchist conceptions of education, but for anarchist philosophy and practice more broadly. The problem is this: if anarchism consists in the principled opposition to all forms of coercive authority, then how is this to be reconciled with situations where justice demands the use of coercion in order to protect some particular good? It seems that anarchist educators are forced to deny coercive authority in principle, whilst at the same time affirming it in practice. This is the paradox of pedagogical authority in anarchist education. Coercive authority is simultaneously impossible and indispensable. Exploring this paradox through a reading of Jacques Derrida’s later work, and, in particular, his conception of justice as requiring openness to the singular situation, I argue that in exercising their authority anarchist educators encounter the aporetic moment in anarchism, experiencing what Derrida calls ‘the ordeal of the undecidable’. Understood this way, the paradox becomes less an indication of anarchism’s limitations than it does its value. For it is here that the problem of pedagogical authority is treated with the gravity that all questions of justice deserve.     

论教学知识的结构

理论性教学知识和实践性教学知识是教学知识领域中的核心概念。研究者常在意识或潜意识层面将二者对立、分割甚至孤立,表现出"显-隐"式、"公-个"式、"研-教"式与"真-善"式等四种分离形态。这四种分离形态实际上是由理论性教学知识与实践性教学知识认识上的机械性、虚假性、人为性和遮蔽性造成的。回归教学知识的本真状态,应以其基本属性———理论性和实践性为向度,建构教学知识统一体结构模型,为现代教学理论与实践的发展奠定知识论基础。     

Moral language and pedagogical experience

As educators are challenged to develop a moral vocabulary of teaching, such a language needs to be sensitive to the way that pedagogical relations are lived and experienced. This exploration into the meanings of care offers a phenomenological puzzle. It concerns the relation between, on the one hand, commonly accepted and professionally received meanings of the ethical concept of care as we find it in the parental, philosophical, and curriculum literature and, on the other hand, the lived experience of caring. The language of care in the field of commerce and in the helping professions tends to pass over these subtle and deeply-felt sensibilities. It seems that for many parents and teachers caring commonly means worrying. Caring is experienced as worrying responsibility. But this worry ('sorgen' in German) is often neglected for happier or more acceptable understandings of care. This should make us wonder about what happens when language turns professional and theoretical, when it becomes charged with meanings that in everyday life are not always recognizable, and when it becomes discharged of meanings that are existentially at its very centre.     

对"教育学理解"的理解

加拿大阿尔伯塔大学教授马克思·范梅南认为 ,“教育学理解”是一种敏感的聆听和观察 ,具有情境性、应用性、规范性的特点 ,其结构包括非判断性理解、发展性理解、分析性理解、教育性理解和形成性理解 ,是“信任的同情心”促成了“教育学理解”。据此反思可以发现 ,当今学校日常教育实践中存在着的许多问题都与“教育学理解”的结构性缺失有关。给予学生全方位的、真正的“教育学理解”,应该是我们努力的方向。而只有指向学生主体性形成的理解 ,才是真正的“教育学理解”。从某种意义上说 ,教育就是对成长历程的一种守望。     

Reconceptualizing the pedagogical value of student facilitation

Sustained discourse is critical to the learning potential of online courses. And, while research has surfaced many factors that mediate interaction, it further suggests that sustained interaction remains elusive. In this paper, I propose that student facilitation may have an impact on the quality of facilitators' interactions following a week of moderating a course discussion. Through a survey of students in two post-secondary online courses, the results suggest that moderation fosters understanding of online learning processes and enhances interaction with others and content. I therefore suggest that moderation acts to inculcate students into the social fabric of an online course, prior to which their role and performance is ill-defined.     

Autonomy through pedagogical research

This qualitative study describes a new professional stance, teacher as pedagogical researcher, provides a rationale for its emergence, demonstrates connections of pedagogical research to autonomy in teaching through the words and lived experiences of teacher researchers, and presents implications for teacher professional development and for teacher education programs in promoting autonomy through pedagogical research. A hermeneutic phenomenological theme analysis of interviews with three teacher researchers revealed seven themes of autonomy through pedagogical research.     

Paulo Freire and the pedagogical traditions of the subject English

I seek here to explain and elaborate on how and why Paulo Freire’s work has significance for educators in today’s ‘affluent’ west, not least in reminding us powerfully of core critical and celebratory values at a time when many teachers, and not only of English, feel under huge pressure – a pressure that in fact verges on the oppressive. My focus here is on native language teaching and learning – English, in effect – thus echoing Freire’s concern for critical literacy and pedagogy and how these may relate constructively to fundamentally Romantic traditions of English pedagogy.     

Building colleges for the future: pedagogical and ideological spaces

This article focuses on the Building Colleges for the Future (BCF) initiative (2008) which saw a wave of new-build Further Education (FE) colleges spring up across England in the final years of the New Labour government. It draws on qualitative data from a research study focusing on four new-build colleges in the West Midlands of England to theorise the BCF initiative. Using theory derived primarily from Lefebvre, the paper contextualises BCF within a frame of neoliberalisation and discusses the impact of the ‘production of space’ represented by the initiative with a research focus on two areas: pedagogy and ideology. The main findings are that these new-build colleges can be interpreted as spatial expressions of policy-makers and others’ perceptions of teaching and learning; in ideological terms, they also trumpet a ‘new lifestyle’ and a ‘new art of living’ for FE staff and students that is however, in tension with residual pedagogical practices and values. The article concludes that despite being an expression of neoliberal abstract space, these new-builds can still be seen as providing a frame for alternative individual and collective encounters with education which may subvert and outlast the processes of neoliberalisation that they appear to embody.     

英语学习动机与教学方法及相互关系的调查分析

本文通过问卷形式,调查了广州市某高中学生学习英语的动机与其喜爱的教学方法之间的关系情况。本项研究采用SPSS(statistics package for social science 10.0)进行数据处理,运用因子分析提取了10个动机因子和7个喜爱的教学方法因子;方差分析结果表明动机在性别上有显著差异;相关分析显示多数动机和学生喜爱的教学方法之间相关显著。     

Power and possibility: the construction of a pedagogical practice

This article examines the relations of power that shape an elementary preservice teacher's pedagogical discourse and practice. The study employs a post-structuralist, connectionist framework to map the multiple social and discursive relations that interconnect to produce what preservice teachers can pedagogically conceive. The analysis shows how relations such as the state, cooperating teachers, school structures, and the preservice teacher function concertedly, within particular temporal and spatial conditions, to create a psychological/individual discourse as the dominant pedagogical framework. At the same time, this study shows how preservice teachers may interpellate, or summon, discourses that allow them to enunciate, or rework into something different, what relations of power have produced.     

Strategies for mentoring pedagogical knowledge

Fundamental for mentoring a preservice teacher is the mentor’s articulation of pedagogical knowledge, which in this research draws upon specific practices, viz.: planning, timetabling lessons, preparation, teaching strategies, content knowledge, problem solving, questioning, classroom management, implementation, assessment and viewpoints for teaching. Mentoring is haphazard; consequently, mentors need a pedagogical knowledge framework and a repertoire of pedagogical knowledge strategies to guide a preservice teacher’s development. Yet, what are strategies for mentoring pedagogical knowledge practices? This qualitative research investigates mentoring strategies assigned to pedagogical knowledge from 27 experienced mentor teachers. Findings showed that there were multiple strategies that can be linked to specific pedagogical knowledge practices. For example, mentoring strategies associated with planning for teaching can include co-planning, verbally reflecting on planning with the mentee and showing examples of the mentor teacher’s planning (e.g. teacher’s plans, school plans, district and state plans). This article provides a bank of practical strategies for mentoring pedagogical knowledge practices to assist a preservice teacher’s development.