Developing pedagogical content knowledge through a self study: a case of teaching "chloralkali industry"

Abstract

I graduated, together with many other teachers, from a previously disadvantaged college of educations. As such, I had poor content knowledge in physical science, the subject I was teaching at the secondary school level. Such inadequate subject matter knowledge impacted negatively on my teaching thus leading to learning difficulties experienced by my students. This experience motivated me to carry out a self-study. In this Self-Study I aimed to develop both my content knowledge and content knowledge for teaching about the chloralkali industry to grade 12 learners. To this end: 1) I constructed and used concept maps to find out how my understanding of the content knowledge and content knowledge for teaching developed, 2) I used Content Representation (Co-Re) and Pedagogical and Professional experience Repertoires (PaP-eRs) to document and portray my pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), 3) I videotaped my teaching lessons and 4) I used a journal, that documented all my thoughts that emerged while preparing lessons and teaching which I then used later for further reflections and directions. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data were carried out. The findings revealed that 1) All the concept maps grew in terms of correctness and connectedness, 2) The increase in complexity scores was not steady as concept map one was more complex than concept map two, though concept map one’s correctness score was higher, 3) The complexity of a concept map does not necessarily imply map’s correctness nor connectedness, 4) the construction and use of concept maps has influenced my content knowledge which I later transformed into the content knowledge for teaching 5) The teaching of the content helped enrich the construction of my concept map as well as the content knowledge, Furthermore, the comparison of the answers to big ideas in developed CoRes coupled with the analyses of the PaP-eRs showed a large increase in my PCK. This was further mirrored in my manifestations in which various domains were carefully integrated to yield better representations, curricular saliency, topic-specific instructional strategies and assessment in accordance with Rollnick’s et al. (2008) tailored model for PCK. I could recommend this approach to other teachers as a way of improving their PCK.