Development of teachers’ knowledge: the breadth, depth, and detail

Abstract

mathematical concepts potentially afforded by the museum exhibits, although they readily appreciated the value of the resources for enhancing mathematics lessons. The second paper, by Shirley Tan and colleagues from Nagoya University in Japan and Lausanne University of Teacher Education in Switzerland, JOURNAL OF EDUCATION FOR TEACHING 2023, VOL. 49, NO. 4, 545–550 https://doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2023.2245219 © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group focusses on the use of ‘bansho’, a pedagogic strategy used in Japan for mathematics teaching. The word bansho means ‘board writing’ and the teacher uses the board to record the flow of the entire lesson, so that learners can see the connections and progression of the various ideas being taught and their illustrative examples, to organise their thinking and to develop new ideas. This paper emphasises the value of bansho for making multiple representations, which clearly resonates with Shulman’s assertion of representation as a key component of the transformation of teachers’ knowledge into a learnable form. The next two articles take a broader view of how teachers increase and deepen their knowledge within their subject disciplines. Lauren Capotosto and Kristina Reardon, from the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, USA, looked at how student teachers understood the concept of disciplinary literacy, a competence that enables learners to read, write, speak about, listen to, and think conceptually and critically as experts in a specific subject. An important finding of this research into substantive and syntactic content knowledge for teaching was that the student teachers saw the literacy skills and practices across a range of disciplines as discrete, and that they had acquired these by inference. The second article to address the matter of PCK within academic disciplines is by Merce Garcia-Mila and colleagues from the University of Barcelona in Spain and San José State University in California, USA. They investigated student teachers’ views about the explicit teaching of the skill of argumentation within subject disciplines. Findings were that whilst the student teachers recognised the value of the idea of learning to argue and arguing to learn, they were less enthusiastic about using lesson time to practice it. Interestingly, there was no great divergence of opinions across the academic disciplines. Enculturation into an academic subject discipline starts at an early educational stage and it is only when someone begins to think about the teachability of a subject that disciplinary norms and values are viewed through a critical lens. Shulman’s belief that the substantive and syntactic components of a subject discipline (at least those that appear regularly in school curricula) were the starting and finishing point of the pedagogic cycle: that by teaching about something one learns more about it. This has been argued to be the upward spiral of teacher learning, i.e. with each turn of the pedagogic cycle, the teacher arrives at an enhanced level of comprehension (la Velle and Newman 2021, 41). One important spin-off from Shulman’s PCK paradigm arose from the increasing use of information and communications technologies in the classroom from the 1990s (see, e.g. Baggott la Velle, Watson, and Nichol 2000; Baggott and Wright 1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1997). Mishra and Koehler (2006) formulated the TPACK model (technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge) to describe the kinds of knowledge needed for successful integration of technology into teaching and learning. There is much evidence to suggest that computer-based simulations can enhance initial teacher education, particularly in controversial or confidential situations (see, e.g. McGarr 2020). The next paper, by Jesús PazAlbo and colleagues from the University of King Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain, and the Governor’s Office of Early Childhood Development, Chicago, USA, describes a study into the use of a simulation of parent, family, and community engagement in education. Student teachers from Spain and the USA engaged with the simulation and completed an online survey. In both national contexts, the student teachers showed increased understanding of ways of promoting family engagement and enhanced knowledge of teachers’ strategies of fostering positive relationships with families. Both these articles 546 EDITORIAL