Researching teacher pedagogical content knowledge in environmental education

Abstract

Summary Effective environmental educators have rich pedagogical content knowledge. This interactive session will highlight a tool for researching this knowledge, and aims to examine its validity and utility in a research project that is exploring teacher pedagogical content knowledge and its manifestation in environmental education classrooms. Description This interactive session will introduce a research project that is exploring teacher pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and its manifestation in environmental education settings. Research has shown that effective teachers have rich pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), a special blend of content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge that is built up over time and experience. This form of professional knowledge, first theorized by Shulman (1987), is topic-specific, unique to each teacher and their students, and can only be gained through teaching practice. It has been characterised as knowing what to teach and how to teach it to a certain group of students. Little research has been published that addresses this key idea for environmental education. The use of a mediational tool known as a Content Representation (CoRe) has been shown to be effective in enhancing PCK development for science and technology teachers, but has not been used in EE to our knowledge. The CoRe represents key concepts to be taught for a particular topic and the pedagogical considerations for their teaching. We are interested in whether the CoRe tool can provide a framework to research the PCK of EE teachers. Our current project involves a partnership between two experienced environmental educators and two EE classroom teachers to co-design a CoRe on the topic of action-taking to address a local sustainability issue. The classroom teachers are then exploring the use of the CoRe as a guide to plan and implement an environmental education unit on that topic. Our research process examines the co-construction of meaning between EE teachers and experts through collaborative CoRe design, and the subsequent translation of ideas in the CoRe (the representation of PCK) into the teachers’ practice. Our research is using an interpretive approach that explores the meanings of the experiences for all participants and we are exploring the concept that the CoRe can be seen as a mediational artefact in the co-design and teaching phases, using an Activity Theory lens within a socio-cultural context. Data are being gathered through field observations of a CoRe design workshop, interviews with the classroom teachers throughout the planning and implementation of the unit, as well as classroom observations, collection of student work, student pre- and post-teaching questionnaires and student focus groups. This session seeks to problematize the validity of a tool such as a CoRe for representing teacher PCK in a complex field such as EE, and to consider our challenges in researching expression of teacher PCK in the classroom. We hope to engage participants in discussion about the nature of teacher PCK in EE, ways to explore its manifestation in teaching and learning, and how these understandings may help inform teacher PCK development in EE.