The nature and development of interaction among components of pedagogical content knowledge in practicum
Introduction
Over the years, there has been considerable debate among those in the field of science education about the criteria for being a qualified teacher. One of the criteria, pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), was introduced to the science education community by Lee Shulman, 1986, Shulman, 1987. PCK was conceptualized as “an understanding of how particular topics, problems, or issues are organized, presented, and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners, and presented for instruction” (Shulman, 1987, p. 8). Since then, science educators have directed increased attention to the role of PCK in science teaching and to the contexts for PCK development (Nilsson & Loughran, 2012). Concurrently, researchers have reported that novice teachers need support and guidance for their professional and PCK development in the first few years of their careers, due to the complex nature of the teaching profession (Wildman, Niles, Magliaro, & McLaughlin, 1989). Therefore, the quality of preservice teacher education gains importance in ensuring that individuals enter the teaching profession with more classroom experience and deeper knowledge.
Teachers should have a firm understanding of all PCK components (e.g., knowledge of learner and instructional strategies). More importantly, according to the scholars, in order to effectively plan and enact instruction for a certain group of students in a specific context, teachers must be able to integrate those components into PCK in a coherent way (Loughran et al., 2006, van Driel et al., 2002). This interplay is important for PCK development; the components interact with each other in highly complex ways (Park & Oliver, 2008). Although interplay is vital for PCK development, researchers have focused more on how various opportunities (e.g., explicit PCK use, teaching experience, and teacher certification programs focusing on some PCK components such as knowledge of learner and instructional strategy) provided in preservice teacher education courses support the development of PCK components separately (De Jong and van Driel, 2004, Hanuscin, 2013, Hume and Berry, 2011). The literature lacks research on how teacher education courses stimulate the development of preservice teachers' ability to integrate PCK components. Surprisingly, careful and deliberate consideration of how these components integrate with each other to structure PCK has been an unexplored issue for science teacher educators until recently (Aydin and Boz, 2013, Kaya, 2009, Padilla et al., 2008, Padilla and van Driel, 2011, Park and Chen, 2012, Park and Oliver, 2008), considering the long history of PCK since 1986. Those studies solely explored the nature of the interaction among PCK components in the instruction of experienced teachers. Other researchers have investigated interaction among PCK components; however, they have only focused on one or two components, exploring how two specific components are related (e.g., Cohen and Yarden, 2009, Veal and Kubasko, 2003), or how the development of one component affects the whole of PCK and one's teaching practice (e.g., Kamen, 1996, Matese, 2005). Still, the way that the interaction among all PCK components develops has not been fully resolved. Moreover, research shows that preservice teachers have fragmented PCK (Lee, Brown, Luft, & Roehrig, 2007) and the literature highlights the importance of support to enable them to integrate PCK components (Aydin and Boz, 2013, Kaya, 2009, Park and Chen, 2012). Therefore, further research is needed regarding the nature and development of the interaction among preservice teachers' PCK components, and regarding how various contexts stimulate the interaction of PCK components. Accordingly, this study aimed to investigate the development of interaction among all PCK components of preservice teachers during a practicum course. In the following section, we present related literature on PCK and the interplay among PCK components.
Section snippets
Pedagogical content knowledge
Shulman (1986) defined PCK as specialized knowledge differentiating the teacher from the content specialist. The current study employed the widely used PCK model proposed by Magnusson, Krajcik, and Borko (1999) because it represents a broader view of PCK than the original conceptualization. According to Magnusson et al. (1999), PCK is the “transformation of several types of knowledge (including subject matter knowledge)” such that “it represents a unique domain of teacher knowledge” (p. 95,
Research design
We utilized a qualitative research methodology, which is interpretative in nature (Creswell, 2007), in an effort to portray the interplay among PCK components in preservice teachers. We performed a secondary analysis on data from our previous study (Aydin et al., 2013). Secondary analysis refers to the re-use of existing data that was collected for another purpose. Secondary analyses can be employed for three purposes: (1) to undertake a more comprehensive analysis of a particular finding in
Results
To understand how the practicum course, which was enriched with mentoring and the PCK framework, supported preservice teachers' development in interplay of PCK components, we created PCK maps for each participant through content analysis of the data (Table 3). The comparison of the pre and post maps via the constant comparative method indicated four salient features of interaction: (1) the interplay among the PCK components was fragmented initially but integrated at the end of the course; (2)
Discussion
In this study, we aimed to examine how a CoRe-based mentoring-enriched practicum supported the developing interaction of PCK components in preservice teachers. PCK literature has argued that preservice teachers do not have a solid PCK (Loughran et al., 2004). With this in mind, we attempted to enrich the effectiveness of preservice teacher education by utilizing PCK instruction, CoRe, and mentoring support, and focused on the interplay among PCK components, which is a sign of PCK development (
Implications
This study has several implications for future research and science teacher education. First of all, PCK components cannot be thought of as independent from each other. For a successful teaching practice and a well-developed PCK structure, teachers need all components integrated together. However, developing such a dynamic interrelationship is a challenging endeavor, considering the complex nature of the teaching process; teachers may be knowledgeable about PCK components separately but fail to
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Mapping and reflecting on integration of the components of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for teaching natural selection: A case study of an experienced middle-school science teacher
2021, Teaching and Teacher EducationCitation Excerpt :Some have proposed that the way teachers engage in reflection (Dewey, 1933; Schon, 1983) on their instruction contributes to the development of PCK (De Jong et al., 2005; Magnusson et al., 1999, pp. 95–132). Reflection is helpful in readjusting and strengthening the integration among the components of PCK by providing opportunities for teachers to be aware of the weaker connections among PCK components and to improve their coherence (Aydin et al., 2015; Nilsson, 2008; Park & Oliver, 2008a). Very few studies have addressed how experienced teachers reflect on the integration of the PCK components through joint reflection with knowledgeable others (Gelfuso, 2016; Mauri et al., 2017); even fewer have examined reflection focused on teaching natural selection to help strengthen teachers' PCK (Lucero et al., 2017; Sickel & Friedrichsen, 2017).
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