To create fruitful learning arrangements, teachers must establish a profound knowledge base in different domains (Baumert & Kunter 2006) and be able to interlink them. Two knowledge domains are essential for the quality of teaching: content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) (Shulman 1986; Hill et al. 2008). In higher education teacher training this CK may be viewed from the higher standpoint of scholarly CK. Empirical studies, however, reveal that numerous student teachers find it challenging to relate scholarly CK to PCK in their studies and struggle to see a significance of scholarly CK for their future profession (Abel 2006; Cramer et al. 2009). As a result, scholarly CK and PCK are often perceived as two independent, fragmented parts of the study programme (Bauer & Partheil 2009). This problem has been addressed internationally – e.g. by the Teacher Education Policy in Europe (TEPE Network) (Hudson & Zgaga 2017) – and nationally by federal campaigns such as ‘Qualitätsoffensive Lehrerbildung’ which aim at reducing fragmentation and improving cohesion in higher education teacher training (Glowinski et al. 2018). Yet, it is surprising that there is little empirical research nationally and internationally providing insight into how scholarly CK and PCK can be dovetailed on the curricular level and how students can be supported in interlinking both knowledge components in higher education teacher training.

The project ‘Spotlights Lehre’ covers these challenges by investigating the following research questions: (1) How can a space for dovetailing and interlinking scholarly CK with PCK be created on the lecture level? (2) Which conditions foster or hinder dovetailing and interlinking scholarly CK with PCK in these lectures? Dovetailing and interlinking are distinctive actions in that dovetailing is regarded as a curricular process in which content lectures and pedagogical content lectures are being connected, whereas interlinking is the activity students do when relating (scholarly) CK  to PCK both mentally and/or practically.

The research questions are answered by investigating new lecture concepts designed to dovetail a course on scholarly CK with a course on PCK by means of two subjects, English and Mathematics in higher education teacher training. In these lectures the students have to prepare a teaching experiment in which they transpose scholarly CK into content knowledge to be taught for pupils by planning and conducting learning arrangements and thereby using the scholarly CK and PCK they have learnt in the courses.

The theoretical background of the project is shaped by the Activity Theory (Leont’ev 1977), a framework which describes and analyses human actions in the socio-cultural world. According to Activity Theory, we consider teaching as an activity constituted by goal-oriented actions. In the projects, these actions cover two steps of didactical transpositions (Chevallard 1989): (1) students transpose scholarly CK into knowledge to be taught, for example by developing tasks to be solved with specific solving techniques for the pupils enriched by PCK. When conducting the teaching (2) they transpose knowledge to be taught into taught knowledge by interacting with the pupils. Within these two steps we expect the student teachers to interlink scholarly CK with PCK. However, any kind of teaching/learning is co-determined by individual limitations such as the student’s cognitive load (Plass et al. 2010), their epistemological beliefs (Dunekacke et al. 2016) about teaching and learning and by institutional constraints (Bosch & Gascón 2014), e.g. the study programme and the curricula which both shape conditions that may hinder or foster dovetailing and interlinking.

To answer the research questions we have chosen two specifically challenging content areas of higher education teacher training: English linguistics (varieties in English speaking cultures) and mathematics (complex analysis). In each area a new lecture concept is designed which dovetails courses mediating scholarly CK with courses mediating PCK. Each concept introduces the students to the scholarly CK and PCK of the respective area with the aim to enable the students to plan and conduct a teaching experiment on contents from the scholarly CK of the course. The teaching experiment is of special importance since we expect the students to use both scholarly CK and PCK in an interlinked manner when planning and conducting it. The development of the lecture concepts follows a nested design-based research approach consisting of three iterative cycles. Each cycle consists of two design levels, the lecture level and the student level. The lecture level focuses on the design of the lecture concept, the empirical exploration of the students’ teaching experiment, data collection and theorisation; the results of theorisation are used for redesigning the next cycle (Bakker 2018). On the student level, the students follow one design cycle within the teaching experiment: they choose a topic from the course, design their teaching experiment, conduct it with pupils and explore their teaching by analysing and reflecting their experience orally and in written documentations. Data consists of the students’ teaching materials, documentations and reflections. Additionally, reflective in-depth interviews on the students’ experience with their teaching experiment are conducted. These interviews are audio- or videotaped and transcribed. Each cohort consists of 30-40 students working in groups of four to six. The students’ documentations are analysed based on principles of reconstructive qualitative research; the students’ reflections and interview data are analysed by a Sequential Interpretative Analysis (Przyborski & Wohlrab-Sahr 2010). The analyses in the two areas are first separated and then joined in a meta-analysis. In the separated analyse, (scholarly) CK, PCK and the relations between both are identified and conditions which foster or hinder dovetailing and interlinking are reconstructed. The results are then collected in a matching analysis-matrix which allows to compare, contrast and group the results to gain within-subject results and across-subject results. The theorising step in the design cycles has led to building a conditional model for dovetailing and interlinking scholarly CK and PCK.

After conducting two design cycles, we are able to provide preliminary results. As an overall result for both subjects, English and Mathematics, it can be stated that interlinking scholarly CK with PCK does not occur naturally. It is an additional challenging accomplishment for students, an explicit goal that should be supported by lecture designs. Therefore, perceiving the study programme as fragmented is a consequence of lacking curricular coherence. Furthermore, we identified the peculiar importance of CK: an in-depth understanding of scholarly CK fosters interlinking (scholarly) CK and PCK, whereas a lack of it seems to hinder it. We identified four dimensions of conditions that foster or hinder curricular dovetailing as well as the students’ interlinking of scholarly CK with PCK: A student dimension and a curriculum dimension are crossed with a matching dimension and a load dimension. First, dovetailing CK with PCK depends on how far the respective courses can be mutually related in the curriculum. The ideal lecture concept consists of two parallel courses with explicit references between their contents. Second, the students’ interlinking of scholarly CK with PCK is influenced by their belief-assumption-knowledge system (Woods 1996): they must see a necessity to interlink scholarly CK with PCK and understand the significance of scholarly CK for their future profession. Third, there exist two loads: curricular workload and the students’ cognitive load (Plass et al. 2010). If the curricular workload is too time consuming, interlinking scholarly CK with PCK might result in overloading. On the other hand, the students’ cognitive load determines if there is space for interlinking. If a lecture overloads the student cognitively, the scholarly CK cannot be fully understood and interlinking scholarly CK with PCK becomes challenging. These results will be tested in the third upcoming design cycle and considered for the transfer to another content area.

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