Abstract
This chapter focuses on enacted PCK (ePCK), i.e. the specific knowledge and skills that science teachers use in their practice, as it plays out in specific classroom contexts while teaching particular content to their students. In unpacking this aspect of the Refined Consensus Model (RCM) of PCK, we consider both the nature of ePCK and its interactions with other realms of PCK, primarily personal PCK (pPCK). Recognising the complexity of classroom practice—in terms of both the uniqueness of each classroom situation and the necessarily spontaneous nature of classroom interactions—we propose a mechanism through which pPCK is transformed into ePCK, and vice versa, throughout the plan-teach-reflect cycle. We then illustrate these ideas using several empirical examples of efforts to capture and analyse science teachers’ ePCK (and associated pPCK). We conclude with discussion of some of the opportunities, challenges and implications of using the RCM, along with our unpacking of ePCK and its relationship to pPCK, as a means of understanding the knowledge that science teachers utilise in the midst of planning, teaching and reflecting.
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- 1.
This is not to say that pPCK and cPCK do not evolve over time (indeed, as detailed below, we argue that pPCK changes through the construction of ePCK). However, both pPCK and cPCK are static in the sense that it is (theoretically) possible to articulate this knowledge and, thus, to measure it, whereas ePCK is inarticulable and fleeting, existing only in the moment (before potentially being transformed into pPCK). In other words, we fully expect that all three realms of teachers’ PCK will change over time, but that change in ePCK will occur at a much shorter timescale.
- 2.
- 3.
Although not discussed here, we expect that similar ambiguities exist at the pPCK–cPCK interface; thus, the outside of the pPCK ring (i.e. the boundary between pPCK and cPCK) is likewise blurred in Fig. 12.1.
- 4.
While repeated encounters with similar situations may eventually lead to tacit knowledge becoming explicit, the opposite may also be true, i.e. explicit knowledge may become tacit, for instance, through the routinisation of certain instructional moves over time, as is the case with highly expert teachers. Thus, ePCK that is transformed into pPCK in tacit form may eventually become explicit pPCK, and ePCK that is transformed into pPCK in explicit form may eventually become tacit pPCK.
- 5.
While acknowledging that video stimulated recall is often used to elicit teachers’ recollections of in-the-moment reasoning (e.g., Akerson, Flick, & Lederman, 2000; Nilsson, 2008), following Ericsson and Simon (1993), it seems that such efforts may be accessing existing pPCK (i.e., the way a teacher has made sense of a given classroom event after the fact), rather than pPCK that is being transformed directly from ePCK during the stimulated recall (i.e., pPCK that could serve as a direct proxy for ePCK).
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Alonzo, A.C., Berry, A., Nilsson, P. (2019). Unpacking the Complexity of Science Teachers’ PCK in Action: Enacted and Personal PCK. In: Hume, A., Cooper, R., Borowski, A. (eds) Repositioning Pedagogical Content Knowledge in Teachers’ Knowledge for Teaching Science. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5898-2_12
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