Taking subject knowledge seriously: from professional knowledge recipes to complex conceptualizations of teacher development

Abstract

The specification of various categories of knowledge that teachers should possess has been a historically consistent feature of moves to professionalize school teaching and to argue for individual teachers' professional autonomy. In this article, I suggest that the ways in which subject knowledge has been treated in research-based recipes for teachers' professional knowledge are often characterized to various degrees by three epistemological problems: the problem of dualism; the problem of objectivism; and the problem of individualism. In place of dualistic, individualistic and objectivist typologies, the article proposes a realistic alternative: a situated view of subject knowledge as emergent within complex and dynamic social systems. A model of this developmental process is offered that represents the development of subject knowledge in practice, that is, teaching a subject in schools. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the practical implications of this view of subject knowledge and teacher development for teacher education programmes.

Keywords:

• Epistemology
• Professional knowledge
• Sociocultural and activity theory
• Subject knowledge
• Teacher education

Notes

1. Audits of student teachers' subject knowledge at the beginning and the end of teacher education programmes were required by the 4/98 Teaching Standards and are still used in many settings in England (see Ellis, 2007, pp. 160–161).

2. In Shulman's typology, three out of seven categories emphasized educational goals, ‘ends, purposes, and values’, ‘knowledge of learners’, ‘knowledge of educational contexts’ and ‘the character of communities and cultures’ (Shulman, 1987, p. 8). Shulman's research design also emphasised the teachers' ‘intellectual biographies’.

3. Values and beliefs are used here in preference to ideology. The dimension of values (a set of personal judgements about a way of life that might be shared) and beliefs (propositional statements arising out of those values) is a set of personal commitments that usually operate self-consciously, whereas ideology is usually understood as operating on a subconscious level and as leading to the interpellation of a particular form of subjectivity.

4. In the original model, the dimension of Practice was referred to as Activity. The modification presented here focuses on Practice in order to foreground this model's relationship to the previous work of (Banks,) Leach and Moon and also that of Lave/Lave and Wenger. I have, however, used ‘social system’ to suggest the division of labour, rules for participation and object (or goal) orientation that develop historically within communities of practice (see Engeström, 1999; Engeström & Miettinen, 1999).

5. One of the conclusions of Burn et al. (2007, in this issue).

6. Further information about the DETAIL project (Developing English Teaching and Internship Learning) is available at: www.education.ox.ac.uk/research/osat/detail.php