Similarly for Donaldson, teachers need in-depth content and pedagogical
knowledges that go beyond the overly vocational orientation of some undergraduate
TE courses. While in Australia and England the move is towards making the theory
acquired in TE subservient to practice through a greater emphasis on practical
experience, the view in Scotland is that existing undergraduate TE programs are
‘too narrowly vocational’, which leads to“an over emphasis on technical and craft
skills at the expense of broader and more academically challenging areas of study”
(Donaldson 2011 : 88). Donaldson’s alternative is the concurrent study of traditional
TE content with‘in-depth academic study’(88) and development of“high levels of
pedagogical expertise”(84). Thus the focus is on broad and deep studies. Teaching
is seen to be a research-informed, intellectual endeavour.
Yet while the case for teachers possessing greater disciplinary knowledge is
significant, teaching requires more than just knowing the content to be taught.
Teachers also requirepedagogicalcontent knowledge—i.e. knowledge abouthow
the content is best taught not just knowledge of the content. Hence,“[m]ere content
knowledge is likely to be as useless pedagogically as content-free skill”(Shulman
1986 : 8). Pedagogical content knowledge relates content to pedagogy; it“embodies
the aspects of content most germane to its teachability”(9). It includes:
the most useful forms of representation of those ideas, the most powerful analogies,
illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations—in a word, the ways of repre-
senting and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others. Since there are
no single most powerful forms of representation, the teacher must have at hand a veritable
armamentarium of alternative forms of representation. (Shulman 1986 : 9; emphasis added)This is in contradistinction to the current emphasis in Australia and England on
increased content knowledge, which assumes that the skills required to effectively
deliver content are generic and transferable. Generic formulae for pedagogy are
insufficient to respond to the varying and changing contexts and needs of the
classroom and of disciplines. Pedagogical content knowledge not only varies
between disciplines and subject areas, but also by year level, classroom mix and the
socio-economic background of students. For example, the best way to teach Science
or English literature may well be different, as is teaching in different contexts. Thus
by diminishing the importance of pedagogic content knowledge and of school
context in favour of greater discipline depth, theteachingof content is arguably
reduced to a set of technical skills.
35.1.2 Proven Approaches
One of the remedies for the perceivedflaws in TE—those that are espoused by
TEMAG in Australia and theImportance of Teachingin England—is to return to
approaches of previous eras and presumed to have been effective. As noted above,
in Australia the concern among politicians is that TE and teaching have been
infiltrated by leftist ideology (Gale and Cross 2007 ). For example, English is said to
528 T. Gale and S. Parker