Chapter 51
Capturing Science PCK Through
Students’ Experiences
Pernilla Nilsson
51.1 Introduction
During the last decades, there has been a growing interest within teacher education
programmes regarding the effectiveness of how to prepare beginning teachers for
their future profession. The inherent complexity of teacher knowledge, and hence
teacher learning, has been well documented in the education research literature (e.g.
Van Driel and Berry 2012 ). For example, educational researchers in different
content areas have raised concerns of the often-experienced lack of connection
between the content and curriculum of methods courses and the acquisition of
knowledge that is essential for promoting students’understanding. Thus, in order to
create conditions for substantial learning, a significant challenge is to provide
beginning teachers with both content knowledge and pedagogical skills to make the
content visible and to adjust it to students’learning needs. To meet this challenge,
more knowledge is needed about how students experience classroom teaching so
that they may become resources not only for developing teachers’practice but also
for the way teacher education in designed and conducted. For example, Ireson and
Hallam ( 2005 ) and Pietarinen ( 2000 ) noted the importance of using students’
perceptions of teaching indicating that students’academic self-perceptions, together
with their perceptions of teaching, contribute to the affective value of schools. What
is a significant educational situation for a teacher may only be partly so for a
student. In this context, it is reasonable to suggest that students’perceptions of
which aspects within a teachers’professional knowledge that make difference for
their learning, might inform the way teacher knowledge is captured and understood.
P. Nilsson (&)
Halmstad University, Halmstad, Sweden
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017
M.A. Peters et al. (eds.),A Companion to Research in Teacher Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4075-7_51
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