ABSTRACT
This paper presents the Mathematics Teacher’s Specialised Knowledge (MTSK) model. It acknowledges earlier contributions to understanding and structuring teachers’ knowledge, in particular, the special debt owed to Shulman’s notion of pedagogical content knowledge and to Ball and collaborators’ Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT), influential for the specialised nature of one of its sub-domains. The authors’ research with teachers has led them to explore the characteristics of MKT and to refine the descriptors relating to its sub-domains, a task which has underlined the difficulty involved in unambiguously delimiting the boundaries which separate these. As a result, and taking into consideration a broader view of the specialised nature of the teacher’s mathematical knowledge, the authors propose a framework which, whilst respecting the major domains of Content Knowledge and Pedagogical Content Knowledge, regards the specialisation in respect of mathematical knowledge as a property which is inherent to the model and extends across all sub-domains.
Acknowledgements
The Spanish Government (EDU2013-44047-P and EDU2016-81994-REDT), the Mexican Sub-secretary of Higher Education (PRODEP) and the Research Centre COIDESO (University of Huelva, Spain) supported this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
ORCID
José Carrillo-Yañez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7906-416X
Nuria Climent http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0064-1452
Miguel Montes http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3181-0797
Luis C. Contreras http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0044-2365
Eric Flores-Medrano http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6134-729X
Dinazar Escudero-Ávila http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6380-9016
Diana Vasco http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7279-6410
Pablo Flores http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3292-6639
Álvaro Aguilar-González http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8550-6718
Miguel Ribeiro http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3505-4431
M. Cinta Muñoz-Catalán http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2329-7612
Notes
1 Dreher, Lindmeier, Heinze, and Niemand (Citation2018) discuss the gap between school knowledge and academic knowledge, and propose SRCK (school-related content knowledge). Unlike MTSK, which finds room for academic knowledge only insofar as it relates to school knowledge, SRCK focuses on the interrelationship between the two types of knowledge (school and academic) in terms of dimensions, such as the curriculum, which MTSK considers within PCK.
2 When writing "the teacher knows" we refer to knowledge a teacher has or may have, with an analytic aim, in which one avoids a prescriptive or evaluative perspective.