ABSTRACT
The challenge that faces us as educators is determining what kinds of knowledge and skills are essential to competent practice in the classroom. In other words, what we are really concerned with is identifying the knowledge base for successful teaching.1 The educational psychologist Shulman (1987) identified seven broad categories of knowledge which would, taken together, constitute the major components of the knowledge base for the classroom teacher. On Shulman’s account, the teacher needs to have mastered:
• content knowledge; • general pedagogical knowledge, with special reference to those broad
principles and strategies of classroom management and organization that appear to transcend subject matter;
• curriculum knowledge, with particular grasp of the materials and programs that serve as tools of the trade for teachers;
• pedagogical content knowledge, that special amalgam of content and pedagogy that is uniquely the province of teachers, their own special form of professional understanding;
• knowledge of learners and their characteristics; • knowledge of educational contexts, ranging from the workings of the
group or classroom, the governance and financing of school districts, to the character of communities and cultures; and
• knowledge of educational ends, purposes, and values, and their philosophical and historical grounds. (p. 54)
Shulman’s conceptualization of the teacher education knowledge base is, by its very nature, quite general and nonspecific. If it is to be useful to us, though, we need to move this knowledge base to the next level of specificity. In other words, how is this knowledge base manifested in the case of the foreign language educator? It is to a discussion of this matter that we now turn.
