ABSTRACT
Pedagogical content knowledge is the special province of teachers: their own form of professsional knowledge and understanding. It was originally conceptualised by Shulman (1986a; 1986b; 1987a) as an amalgam of subject matter knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge. However in this model it is the blending of the knowledge bases, described in preceding chapters. All of these knowledge bases contribute towards the richest form of pedagogical content knowledge, which underpins expert teaching. It is possible to have a partially developed form of pedagogical content knowledge: indeed this is what most beginning teachers start with. Over the course of one’s career, knowledge bases which are only partial or nonexistent, grow and become fully developed as part of the amalgam. As a form of knowledge, it comprises facts, concepts, skills, processes, beliefs and attitudes in the same way that other disciplines do: the differences are that this is blending of many different kinds of knowledge; and it is the special province of the teacher. There are a number of key ideas which need to be grasped for a full understanding of pedagogical content knowledge. These are: the key notion of representation, which might be said to be the summation of all the knowledge bases in action; the idea of knowledge bases as interacting sets; the idea that sometimes only some of the knowledge bases work together; the idea that in an expert act of teaching, all of the knowledge bases are present in the amalgam; and the idea that the knowledge bases are the submerged ‘nine-tenths of the iceberg’. These will be dealt with in turn.
