Relating subject matter knowledge (Ball et al., 2008) and pedagogical content knowledge is a challenge for many students in teacher education at university (Hudson & Zgaga, 2017; Mehlmann & Bikner-Ahsbahs, 2018) even though this issue has been around for more than hundred years (cf. Klein, 1908) in terms of a perceived discontinuity from learning about the subject matter in university towards teaching in school (Bauer & Partheil, 2008). It seems that those areas of knowledge are often perceived as different compartments, worsened by the fact that they are often taught in separate courses at university. Focusing on this problem of missing interlinkage, the Teacher Education Policy in Europe (TEPE) network has been calling for “linking educational sciences with subject methodologies” explicitly (Hudson & Zgaga, 2017, p. 6), but the problem remains unsolved.

The project ‘Spotlights Lehre’ (which is part of the ‘Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung’, a campaign for the improvement of teacher education by the federal ministry of education and research) aims at reducing this fragmentation by developing innovative teaching formats which interlink the different academic disciplines in both curriculum and contents.

As theoretical background the project employs Ball et al.’s (2008) refinement of Shulman’s (1986) classical model of teacher knowledge, distinguishing between subject matter knowledge (SMK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), with the former including specialized content knowledge (SCK) which refers to content knowledge “not typically needed for purposes other than teaching” (Ball et al. 2008, p. 402). Moreover, as a reference framework, we employ boundary crossing (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011; Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star, 2010) as a design goal in teaching that enables students to link SMK and PCK in the creation of tasks.

In two subprojects, one in mathematics and one in English as a foreign language, fragmentation is faced with the same implementation strategy, namely having students design lessons or tasks for pupils based on concepts from the scientific discipline which were taught during the semester. In English, a linguistic seminar on varieties of the English language and a seminar in language teaching pedagogy have been thematically dovetailed, adding a teaching experiment at the end in which students have to transform knowledge from both seminars into practice. In mathematics, a course on complex analysis is split up after two thirds of the semester, initiating teacher students to plan and conduct a learning arrangement for upper secondary pupils, thus providing the opportunity to interlink SMK with PCK.

Through reflection in the process of designing the tasks or lessons the students may interlink SMK with PCK. Regarding reflection we follow Schön’s (1983) notion of the reflective practitioner as a professional who reflects in-action by creating ad-hoc theories and on-action using theoretical knowledge. The task we set for the students, namely creating learning materials for pupils, functions as a catalyst to initiate boundary crossing between SMK and PCK. The learning arrangements created by the students constitute emerging boundary objects (e.g. work sheets, tasks, computer applets), i.e., objects that allow to be worked on according to both knowledge areas, SMK and PCK, and, hence, they serve to build and rethink the relations between SMK and PCK.

Our research questions are:

• Which conditions support or hinder interlinking SMK and PCK?
• Which strategies for interlinking SMK and PCK can be reconstructed from the students’ work and documentations?

To answer the research questions, we use a design research approach (Gravemeijer & Cobb, 2006; Prediger et al., 2012) to implement two nested design cycles, one on lecture level and one on student level, guided by boundary crossing (Hanke & Bikner-Ahsbahs, 2018). We are currently in the third and final cycle. In mathematics, the lecture is split after two thirds and the students continue with the preparation of learning arrangements based on a phenomenon related to the contents in complex analysis they just learned. The students implement their materials with pupils from upper secondary schools at the end of the course. During the semester, the mathematics students also visit a seminar with sessions on task design. In English, the participants enroll in a linguistic seminar on varieties of English in the foreign language classroom and a parallel seminar in language teaching pedagogy. In the latter, the students prepare lesson plans and materials and implement them in regular school classes. The participants of the project are usually in their first semester of the M.Ed. study program. So far, 36 students have participated in Spotlight-Y and 42 in the varieties project within two years. Most students have preliminary experience in teaching from practical phases in their course of studies. The teaching experiment initiates the students to interlink elements of the two knowledge areas, SMK and PCK. As this interlinking cannot be observed directly, we rely on self-reports in the form of different types of written reflections and materials the students develop for their teaching or their lesson plans. More specifically in the mathematics project, the students wrote a so-called preflection to anticipate problems before implementing their tasks, an ad-hoc description with reflections immediately after the implementation and a portfolio with individual reflections on the whole course. In the English project, students wrote a reflection on their own learning of the English language and the different varieties encountered, and a similar portfolio at the end. These data are supplemented with semi-structured interviews. Based on principles of reconstructive qualitative research (Przyborski & Wohlrab-Sahr, 2010) and abductive reasoning (Reichertz, 2013) as the main tools, the different types of data have been analyzed for reconstructing interlinking strategies or lack of such pointing towards conditions for interlinking processes. Findings are validated in weekly working sessions usually with five researchers.

Preliminary results portend two types of findings. On the one hand, the data point towards conditions for interlinking different areas of knowledge, especially by highlighting the barriers where it was not (or only partially) successful, and on the other hand, we have reconstructed interlinking strategies used or referred to by the students. One example of a condition is understanding key concepts of the respective discipline and identifying them in the school subjects English and Mathematics. Generally, we find that interlinking SMK with PCK is an additional demand for the students that does not happen automatically, especially when references between the two areas are not made explicit in the course. By making changes in course design and observing their impact we have improved our understanding on how to support students to link between SMK and PCK, e.g., through making expectations explicit and providing concrete examples of learning arrangements which make use of both knowledge areas. Two examples for students’ strategies for interlinking SMK and PCK, either mentioned as having been pursued while working on their teaching materials or reflected on retrospectively, are - analogy building between own learning experiences related to specific concepts in the mathematics or linguistics course and the anticipated learning experiences of pupils with the respective contents in the school subjects, - application of already available, pre-structured learning materials on other content areas. The building of analogies can function as a tool to raise awareness for difficulties of pupils (e.g., when the difficulty to visualize graphs of functions met by a student in the university course is compared to pupils’ difficulties in creating graphs in school) or for varieties of the English language. Apart from answering these questions the long-term goal of the project is to produce means to transfer this approach of designing for learning to other fields.

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