In the educational research area exist a multitude of scholarly texts on teacher knowledge and its development since Shulman’s articles in 1986 and 1987. An overview of the scientific texts and articles about knowledge forms is hardly to give. Bullough (2001, p.656) states that Shulman’s idea of teacher knowledge was on the right time to become the starting point of a popular discourse. Nespor and Barber (1991) say that Shulmans statements about the teacher as an object becomes scientific fact, because the conditions of the article production are pushed into background. The aim of this study is to explore the development of teacher knowledge concepts over time. Against this background the paper focus on Shulmans idea of knowledge and how it became a scientific fact in German and British scientific texts trough citation, reception and modification. Because of this historical and comparative investigation I will have a deeper look at national embedded particularities in creating a research object.

Alexander, Schallert and Hare (1991) analyzed the problem of knowledge definition by scientists and its impact on further research: they investigated the terminological application of ‘knowledge’ in more than 300 articles in scientific journals in the research area ‘Language and Cognition’. They identified four general categories of problems in the scientific application of the term ‘knowledge’:

“Specifically, across studies (a) subcategories of knowledge were inconsistently incorporated, (b) different aspects of knowledge were referred to by the same terms, (c) the same aspects or kinds of knowledge were referred to by different terms, and (d) the interactions among the different aspects or kinds of knowledge were represented differently, or ignored altogether” (p. 319).

Furthermore, Ben-Peretz (2011) analysed nine articles of the journal ‘Teaching and Teacher Education’ (TATE) regarding to the topic of teacher knowledge. On the one hand she stated that the definition of teacher knowledge was extended until 2009 by the addition of new contexts and conceptualities. Also scientists vary in the denotation of teacher knowledge – for example ‘professional knowledge‘, ‘teachers‘ personal practical knowledge‘ und ‘teacher change‘. On the other hand, teacher knowledge “has been extended from knowledge of subject matter, curriculum and pedagogical content knowledge, to include general themes like global issues and multiculturalism” (p. 8).

Both studies follow the basic assumption of the Social Studies of Science (Knorr-Cetina 1981; Knorr-Cetina & Mulkay 1983): scientific notions, conceptualities and knowledge are constructed by the manner scientists work, discuss and argue in relation to the existing scientific discourse.  In this approach ‘discourses’ are seen as socio-historically situated “practices,” manifest as textual data, not representing external objects, but constituting them. According to the discourse model of the Social Studies of Science the ‘social’ is not in extern environment of the discourse (for example social interests). It is rather located in inner scientific communication and enforcement processes. Gilbert und Mulkay (1981) plead for the analyses of regularities of the written or spoken discourse, which are produced trough scientists. The specification of the scientists’ assumptions, of their justifications and the presentation of their research objects are described as „this is the way some actors made things appear to be“ and not as „this is the way things really are“ (Mulkay et al 1983, p. 187). The question is not if those phenomena are real or not. In fact, scientists act like they were real. Against this background, educational research can be seen as everyday practices which construct research knowledge as ‘true, ‘real’ or ’objective’ embedded in discursive communication and negotiation processes. In the terms of discourse analysis: researchers create the objects they talk about (Mulkay et al 1983, Nespor & Baryslake 1991).

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