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Pedagogical Content Knowledge in a Mathematics Adolescent Education Master of Arts Program: A Case Study

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Pedagogical Content Knowledge in STEM

Part of the book series: Advances in STEM Education ((ASTEME))

Abstract

This chapter is a case study examining the symbiotic relationship among an Arts and Sciences mathematics department, a school of education, and a large urban public school district, as a context for the development of pedagogical content knowledge in the curriculum. Specifically, Hunter College, CUNY, has a long-standing master’s program in adolescent mathematics education, which is a joint program with the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the School of Education. Recently a subset of students in this program have also been involved in a teacher education residency program funded by the National Science Foundation. One of the goals of this residency program is to explore various interpretations of pedagogical content knowledge and their implementation in the college and the high school curriculum. This chapter describes several of the courses in this master’s program, which seem to be fertile grounds for pedagogical content knowledge. We consider the creation of a new course, dealing with misconceptions in mathematics learning, which explicitly revolves around the idea of PCK, a geometry course which was revised and optimized for the teacher education master’s program and incorporates PCK, and an existing problem-solving course, which naturally contains elements of PCK.

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks Prof. Barry Cherkas, Prof. Sandra Clarkson, and Dr. Patrick Burke of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics for help in presenting this case study. They are the bedrock of a long-standing and successful mathematics education Master of Arts program at Hunter College. I would also like to thank Sarah Arpin for doing an excellent job of reinventing the Axiomatic Geometry course. I thank my colleagues on the NSF MSP grant which developed the MASTER residency program. This work was supported by National Science Foundation—Mathematics and Science Partnership Grant #1238157.

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Thompson, R. (2018). Pedagogical Content Knowledge in a Mathematics Adolescent Education Master of Arts Program: A Case Study. In: Uzzo, S., Graves, S., Shay, E., Harford, M., Thompson, R. (eds) Pedagogical Content Knowledge in STEM. Advances in STEM Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97475-0_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97475-0_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97474-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97475-0

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