Geography pre-service teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge

This paper reports on an exploratory study that investigated the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of four Geography pre-service teachers as they completed their final practicum of their Bachelor of Secondary Education programme. It uses Shulman’s (1986, 1987) two categories of PCK as a conceptual framework to identify the participants’ PCK of their Geography teaching. The first type of PCK is teachers’ representations of content that is pedagogically powerful for students; the second type of PCK refers to teachers’ understanding of what makes the learning of specific topics easy or difficult for students. Historically, researchers have tended to focus on the teachers’ representations component of PCK while little evidence-based research has been reported on the second category of PCK. Findings from this study show that all participants demonstrated both types of PCK. This study sheds light on the importance of teacher-educators modelling both types of PCK as both are equally important for pre-service teachers.