In-service teachers’ perspectives of pre-service teachers’ knowledge domains in science

Abstract

The concept of pedagogical content knowledge is integral to teaching as a profession and is often considered to be an important aspect of a teacher’s lived experience. Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is described as a transformation of teacher knowledge from a variety of domains of knowledge, which includes subject matter knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and knowledge about content. This exploratory study reports on in-service natural science teachers’ inferences regarding preservice teachers’ performance in natural science teaching, as observed during a practice teaching period. Perspectives of in-service teachers of the different knowledge domains of pre-service teachers during their final year were investigated. Semi-structured interviews, incorporating a specific set of open-ended questions, were conducted with in-service teachers following a practice teaching period of four weeks. The findings indicate that the in-service teachers rated the pre-service teachers positively in some knowledge domains but less positively in other knowledge domains. This has prompted some rethinking on the structure and presentation of the curriculum, in our undergraduate teacher education programme, to include and accommodate approaches that would enable better uptake of various knowledge domains and improve PCK development.

Keywords: in-service teachers; pedagogical content knowledge; pre-service teachers; teacher knowledge