Defining Science Content Knowledge for Teaching as a Base for Teacher Development: A Case for Organic Chemistry

Abstract

This paper addresses the important question of the nature of the subject matter (content knowledge) that should be a base for a science teacher education curriculum. We present our argument in two parts. Firstly, we report an argument conceptualising the nature of content knowledge for science teaching that we called TerSCK. This is followed by a presentation on the shape of a science teacher education curriculum for developing TerSCK, introduced as a TerSCK-based teacher education curriculum. Our conceptualisation argument is built on a systematic analysis of previous qualitative arguments about the nature of content knowledge for teaching school science subjects. It is influenced by Deng’s foundational work critiquing the grip of the doctrine of academic disciplines in theorising content knowledge for teaching, as the base from which teachers pedagogically transform their content knowledge. While acknowledging this criticism, we present the appropriate content knowledge for science teachers (TerSCK) to reflect the complex relationship between the academic and the school science kinds of content knowledge through three of Deng’s relational dimensions: logical, epistemological and social dimensions that constitute TerSCK. Drawing on Schwab’s curriculum faces, these relational dimensions of TerSCK were translated into a TerSCK-based curriculum comprising five elements: (i) the fundamental concepts of the topic within the discipline; (ii) interconnections between the concepts that make up the fundamental concepts; (iii) tensions from the process of extracting the discipline fundamentals into the school curriculum constraints; (iv) scientific and other modes of inquiry from non-science disciplines; and (v) cultivating social agency. We close our argument by illustrating the implementation of the TerSCK-based curriculum using the organic chemistry topic. Our recommendations call for further studies exploring the validation of a TerSCK-based curriculum across different science topics.