Exploring PCK from the perspective of intellectual virtues: pedagogical content intellectual virtues for twenty-first century science education

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This article contributes to ongoing debates on the relevance of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) in the twenty-first century, in which science, science education and society are constantly evolving. It also addresses long-standing shortcomings of PCK, including limited attention to affective dimensions and concerns about its epistemological clarity. Drawing on philosophy, we propose that virtue epistemology with its concept of intellectual virtues offers a promising way forward. To address the apparent content- and context-specificity of teachers’ intellectual virtues for educational purposes, we introduce the novel concept of Pedagogical Content Intellectual Virtues (PCIVs). We explored the enactment of PCIVs by four science education students who designed contemporary instructional products. Findings suggest that participants demonstrated a range of PCIVs, including intellectual autonomy, carefulness, empathy, and open-mindedness, which appeared to support their instructional design processes. Taken together, the findings indicate that a PCIV perspective can offer additional insight into key aspects of PCK, particularly by highlighting affective, motivational, and judgement-related aspects of teachers’ thinking that are often less visible in existing PCK conceptualisations.