The development of content knowledge through teaching practice

Abstract

Research on the unique nature of teachers' subject matter knowledge and how this knowledge interacts with other domains of the knowledge base for teaching has been an extremely productive field of inquiry since the mid 1980s. In particular, Shulman's (1987) construct of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has been taken up by researchers to describe the subject specific knowledge of teachers in a variety of disciplines. Yet while this concept has been widely applied to describe expert teachers' knowledge, much less research has examined how PCK develops in and through teaching practice. To address this need, the present study examines how one teacher's understanding of a pedagogical genre developed through her first semester of teaching a post-secondary second language (L2) writing class. Drawing on a sociocultural theoretical (SCT) perspective, this study traces the development of a single subject matter concept, points of analysis, as it emerges in teaching activity, is mediated by the teacher's interactions with her students and the researcher, and is eventually incorporated into her knowledge of the analytic essay genre and how to teach it.