Our aim is to critically analyze Shulman’s concept of PCK from the point of view of two francophone theories in didactique des disciplines (subject matter didactics): the theory of discipline scolaire (school subject) as a product of school culture and the one of didactic transposition. Shulman (1986, 9) defines PCK as an armamentarium of forms of representation about content to be taught that originates in research or wisdom of practice and about learners’ ways of learning topics and lessons. At least the following questions arise from this definition: How are these representations built up? What is their social form? What are the mechanisms of transformation of content in order to guarantee their “teachability” (ibid.)? We will show that the two mentioned theories, that are the basis of many research projects in Europe, contain elements for answering these questions. Both share the assumption that school subjects are the means and the form of selecting and organizing content in order to make it teachable. Both consider that there are socially and historically built institutions that constitute the core of teaching in schools, namely school subjects. Chervel (1998; recently Denizot, 2018) defines school subjects through four dimensions: progressively organized sequences of content, exercises in a larger sense, motivational dimensions and means of evaluating. They are the ever-changing product of the acting of teachers as a profession on generations of students and form the culture of school. Their function is to (trans)form the mode of thinking, speaking and doing of students in order to give them better access to the culture of a society. In his theory of didactic transposition, Chevallard (1989; cf. Tiberhien & Sensevy, 2015) analyses the mechanisms of the transformation of knowledge and their organization into school subjects in order to become teachable: to be publicly declared as knowledge; to be learned to transform used knowledge into knowledge to be taught (which imply its decontextualization with profound effects on its sense); the fact that knowledge has to be segmented and organized progressively within school subjects. We will re-examine Shulman’s theoretical stance in the light of these two theories: they show that Shulman’s theory lacks an essential, socially mediating institution, namely school subjects. It seems as if it would be the individual teacher who transforms a given content into a teachable one through activating his or her PCK (, see also Deng, 2007, from another point of view).

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