Transforming the Subject Matter: Examining the Intellectual Roots of Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Abstract

This article questions the basic assumptions of pedagogical content knowledge by analyzing the ideas of Jerome Bruner, Joseph Schwab, and John Dewey concerning transforming the subject matter. It argues that transforming the subject matter is not only a pedagogical but also a complex curricular task in terms of developing a school subject or a course of study. This curricular task, however, has been obscured by the concept of pedagogical content knowledge that construes transformation as primarily a pedagogical task in terms of transforming the subject matter of an academic discipline into pedagogical forms. The article further argues that what constitutes the subject matter of a school subject is an essential issue of curriculum research and inquiry—an issue that is crucial yet largely underexplored in Shulman and associate’s conceptualization of teachers’ specialized subject matter knowledge.

Notes

Notes

1 There are broader schools of thought that have a bearing on the concept of pedagogical content knowledge in addition to that of Bruner, Schwab, and Dewey (see Bullough, 2001). I focus on Bruner, Schwab, and Dewey because they all speak directly of transforming the subject matter.

2 This assumption seems to be mostly relevant to beginning secondary school teachers. In fact, Shulman and associates’ conceptualization was developed in the context of, and informed by, their research project “Knowledge Growth in Teaching,” with a central focus on how a novice secondary school teacher transforms his or her previously learned content knowledge of the academic discipline into a form that is suitable for classroom teaching (Shulman, 1986, 1987; Wilson, Shulman, & Richert, 1987). The assumption, however, could be rather problematic for elementary school teaching because of the significant difference between the elementary school curriculum and academic disciplines. Leinhardt etal. (1991) argue that the subject matter knowledge needed for teaching elementary school mathematics is “the knowledge that a teacher needs to have or use in the course of teaching a particular school-level curriculum,” rather than “the knowledge of advanced topics that a mathematician might have” (p. 88).

3 For a discussion of this conflation, see Deng (2007).