Specific Pedagogical Content Reasoning

Abstract

The concept of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) has had a major influence on research on scienceteacher knowledge and thinking in the past 25 years. However, PCK has shown to be a difficultconcept to characterize and thus it has been the subject of diverse interpretations. In this paper Ipresent a personal reflection about both the nature of PCK and its usefulness in the characterizationof teacher thinking. In particular, I discuss the need for shifting our efforts from cataloguing teacherknowledge about teaching a particular subject to characterizing teachers’ specific pedagogical contentreasoning (SPCR) as they face specific pedagogical tasks in diverse contexts.