Skip to main content
Schulman Pedagogical content knowledge
Although Schulman(1986) acknowledged Dewey as one of the pre
cursors of his ground breaking idea of PCK, no one has paid much attention
towards the works of Dewey to find out his understanding of PCK .
Lougharn(2012) claimed that each and every teacher has its own PCK, which maybe
similar t or different from the PCK of other teachers. Moreover, different
researchers have also identified certain important domain of PCK. Mostly it
comprises knowledge of the content to be taught, teaching strategies that fit
best to teach that content, student’s way of learning that content and
curricular knowledge.
Not many researchers however have pointed out any kind of
organized account of a teacher’s PCK. Mostly the teacher’s accounts of their
PCK are in the form of raw data, needed further work to rduce the concrete
account in the form ideas.
PCK does not owe its existence to Schulman’s articulation
and discovery of PCK. It must be there right from the beginning. On this ground
it can be said that teachers , even before the discovery of PCK, had this type
of knowledge, if PCK has to qualify as an essential trait of a teacher. This
amounts to saying that teachers of the past also had PCK , and not only that
had their own PCK, they must also have expressed it .
Dewey being a great teacher himself and an ardent researcher
and learner of educational processes and teaching, also had his notion of PCK,
which he did not obviously presented under the title PCK, but must have presented
in his writings. However, there are certain claims in modern research on PCK
that can be utilized to confront this view that Dewey’s general reflections on
method and content and cannot be subsumed under the heading of PCK.
In certain researchers it is claimed that the knowledge of
pedagogical strategies that a teacher possesses is of a generic character,
whereas the knowledge of content is actually of a concrete and specific nature.
In other researches, this claim is contested and it is said that even the
knowledge of pedagogical strategies is of a specific nature. They put forward
the difficulty which a teacher faces in teaching a subject outside his or her
content area. So if a math teacher, who knows his PCK well in the case of
mathematics, teaches physics, he or she is certain to face difficulties finding
proper strategies to teach physics.
If we grant the later view that teacher’s knowledge of
pedagogical strategies is of a specific nature rather than a generic one, we,
cannot deny the fact that a teacher, who in the course of time, has developed
PCK in two different content areas, can somehow reflect on his or her PCK of
both subjects to furnish the similarities and differences between the two. In
case such an account is produced by a teacher, who has simultaneously mastered
teaching of two domains of content area, then that account can recognized as a general
statement of pedagogical content knowledge.
Some people would argue that PCK of one subject is so
different from that of the other that there is no possibility of drawing any
similarity between the two.
Comments