Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is a teacher’s understanding of how to help students understand specific subject matter. It includes knowledge of how particular subject matter topics, problems, and issues can be organized, represented, and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners, and then presented for instruction. Magnusson, Krajck and Borko (1999; p. 95) described PCK as the “transformation of several types of knowledge for teaching (including subject matter knowledge), that as such it represents a unique domain of teacher knowledge”. This transformative model of PCK, theoretical perspective of the present study, consists of five categories; namely, i) knowledge of science curriculum, ii) knowledge of students’ understandings, iii) knowledge of assessment, iv) knowledge of instructional strategies, and v) orientation toward science teaching.

Many researchers emphazised that PCK has not a constant body and it is gained by teachers with experiences on teaching and. In this respect, De Jong et al. (1999) highlighted that although teachers may be expected to acquire their content knowledge during their student period, they develop their pedagogical content knowledge mainly from the moment they start to teaching. Literature emphasized that pedagogical content knowledge has been developing in time and expert teachers have more pedagogical content knowledge than less experienced one (Abd-El-Khalick, 2006; Käpylä, Heikkinen, & Asunta, 2008).  Regarding the importance of PCK and its components, educational researchers have begun to emphasize for more than 20 years (Carter, 1990; Grossman, 1990; Hashweh, 2005; Shulman, 1986, 1987; Zembylas, 2007). While PCK has been a subject of research since the 1980s, little is known about the process of PCK development, especially in experienced teachers (Eilks & De Jong, 2009). Specifically, in science and environmental education literature, there are few study explaining experienced teachers’ topic specific PCK (Ravindranath, 2007). In the line these findings, current study interested in identifying the nature of in-service science teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge about environmental issues.

In addition, current study aimed to examine teachers’ understanding of education for sustainable development (ESD). Although, the concept of sustainable development has been emphasized since 1980s, ESD has become very popular through the European Union in many countries including Turkey in recent years. The European Union Standards stated that ESD should be integrated to any disciplines in educational settings. In this manner, being one of the candidate countries waiting for European Union Membership, Turkey have tried to fulfill the EU standards on educational settings. In this sense, the science curriculum has revised in 2013 and the concepts of sustainable development has been added as a subject in different topics, so it is important that elementary science teachers should have adequate understanding and pedagogical content knowledge on ESD. The revised curriculum has just been applied yet in the schools, so the determination of experienced science teachers’ PCK on the components of sustainable development have an invaluable importance for identifying their deficiencies (knowledge, practice etc.) and needs to apply ESD in schools.

Hereby, research question of this study was identified as: ‘‘What are the experienced science teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge about environmental issues (especially, energy) in the context of education for sustainable development?’’. 

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