This contribution will deal with some of the strengths and weaknesses of Shulman’s concept of “Pedagogical Content Knowledge” (PCK; Shulman, 1987) and a new scientific approach of Fachdidaktik (“Subject-Matter Didactics”; Bayrhuber et al., 2017) from Germany. By comparison some commonalities and differences between the two lines of thinking will be worked out and illustrated. On the German side, we will particularly base ourselves on a so-called General Subject Didactics (GSD) as a metatheory of individual scientific studies of the teaching and learning of specific subject areas/domains. The goal is to demonstrate that Shulman’s theoretical concept, as innovative and influential as it is, has some important deficiencies and lacks some central elements in describing the necessary knowledge and pedagogical competence base for professionally guided actions and a successful instruction of a subject teacher. Shulman’s notion of PCK has already been characterized and qualified in the other presentations. Certainly, one of his main achievements is to point out and insist on the topic- or subject-specificity of all teaching and learning in school and thus on the integrative activities of teachers between content knowledge, curricular knowledge and the pedagogical skills in mediating a particular topic/content to a specific group of learners with their respective background conditions. This “special amalgam of content and pedagogy” (1987: 8) is called PCK. My critical points will be: 1. The reflexive and normative dimensions of content knowledge are missing, also the modelling character of disciplinary knowledge (no subject teacher, not even scientists can possibly have an overview of a disciplinary domain nowadays). 2. PCK is seen as too individual, the role and aims of scientific, subject-oriented research towards unfolding a theory of subject-specific Bildung (education in a comprehensive sense) are neglected. 3. The constructive, autonomous learning processes of students, their participatory role, are under-defined in Shulman’s concept; PCK focusses on teaching only. 4. The approach highlights functional aspects of education, reaching for a cognitive activation of learners, whereas their personality and identity development through in-depth subject learning (implying emotional and attitudinal activation, being much less operationalizable), are (largely) left out. For these missing aspects in PCK and the problems identified, a General Subject-Matter Didactics approach, as developed by a German group of scholars (cf. Bayrhuber et al., 2017, translated 2019; Bayrhuber & Frederking, in process) has answers to offer. These will be discussed and related to other forms of re-envisioning of PCK at the end.

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