Originating from the effort of Shulman (1987) and associates to address a “missing paradigm” in research on teaching and to professionalize teaching in the 1980s, pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has become a highly popular and influential concept in the educational community. It has been used to inform policies on teacher certification, licensure examination and professional development. It has also been employed as a basis for designing teacher education and continuous professional development programs. Furthermore, the concept has spurred a significantly large body of empirical studies devoted to the investigation and elaboration of this concept in relation to teaching and teacher education, particularly in mathematics and science. Over the last decades, the concept has been subject to numerous criticisms, modifications and expansions (see Depaepe, Verschaffel, & Kelchtermans, 2013). However, despite being questioned by several scholars (e.g., Deng, 2007; Deng & Luke, 2008; Thornton and Barton, 2010), the underlying assumption that a teacher necessarily transforms his or her content knowledge of an academic discipline into pedagogical forms still remains taken for granted. This assumption tends to ignore the fact that in classroom what a teacher works with is the content of a school subject in the institutional curriculum. As a result, what a teacher needs to know and be able to do with respect to the content in the institutional setting remains largely unexplored and undertheorized in the PCK literature. The paper contributes to a re-envisioning of PCK through exploring what is entailed in teachers’ understandings of content within the framework of the institutional curriculum, with a central concern for the development of human powers (capacities or abilities, ways of thinking, understanding worlds, etc.). This is done by revisiting Bildung-centered Didaktik and in view of a curriculum making framework (Doyle 1992, Westbury 2000). The central thesis is that a teacher necessarily interprets the content contained in the institutional curriculum, identifying its elemental elements (penetrating cases, basic ideas, concepts and methods) and ascertaining its educational potential. The interpretation calls for a special kind of Didaktik thinking which is informed by a theory of content concerning what content is, what educational potential content has, and how content can be made to open up opportunities for cultivating human powers. This Didaktik thinking – directed toward identifying the powerful, elemental elements and ascertaining the educational potential of content – needs to be seen as being at the heart of teachers’ professional understanding of content.

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