Our education is continuously confronted with the challenges and opportunities of the rapidly changing society. Whether these changes concern technological developments, varying political landscapes, economic fluctuations, or global pandemics and war, they bring uncertainties to our students, teachers, teacher educators and other stakeholders in education. To aptly train teachers for their increasingly difficult teaching task, Fenstermacher (1986) already pointed out that the development of sound reasoning is vital in teacher education. More recently, Loughran (2019) described the importance of overtly articulating teachers’ pedagogical reasoning for teachers’ professionalism. 

Teachers’ reasoning or pedagogical reasoning is broadly defined as the why underlying teachers’ educational practice. Research studying pedagogical reasoning therefore reveals the underlying thinking of teachers when making decisions during their teaching. The concept was originally described by Shulman (1987) as the pedagogical reasoning and action (PR&A) process where content knowledge (CK) is transformed to teachable elements. Through this process, the individual teacher uses as well as builds their professional knowledge. Since then, research has taken different perspectives towards this complex concept and investigated it in a variety of contexts, using a variety of conceptualisations and operationalizations.

In this symposium, we’ll take you through three recent papers involving pedagogical reasoning within varying contexts to highlight the importance yet complexity of the concept. First, a scoping review on the conceptualizations of pedagogical reasoning in publications between 2000 and July 2023 will be discussed by Lotte Schreuders (PhD Candidate, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Next, Ottavia Trevisan (PostDoc, University of Padova, Italy) and Anneke Smits (Professor, Windesheim University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands) will present their work on different qualities of preservice teachers’ pedagogical reasoning when confronting the complexity of the job through their internships. Finally, Bram Cabbeke (PhD candidate, University of Ghent, Belgium) will focus on the importance of PR in the context of technology integration by presenting a study focused on exploring how and when pre-service teachers adopt PR when collaboratively designing ICT-rich curriculum materials. 

During the symposium, we wish to inform fellow researchers about the importance of pedagogical reasoning in education, especially in these times of uncertainty. We hope to inspire them to give more attention to this concept and join us in our quest to gain more insight into teachers’ PR.

Anderson, S. E., & Putman, R. S. (2023). Elementary special education teachers’ thinking while planning and implementing technology-integrated lessons. Education and Information Technologies, 28(8), 9459–9481. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-022-11358-0 Fenstermacher, G.D. (1986). Philosophy on research on teaching: Three aspects. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (p. 37-49). New York: MacMillan. Heitink, M., Voogt, J., Verplanken, L., Van Braak, J., & Fisser, P. (2016). Teachers’ professional reasoning about their pedagogical use of technology. Computers and Education, 101, 70–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2016.05.009 Holmberg, J., Fransson, G., & Fors, U. (2018). Teachers’ pedagogical reasoning and reframing of practice in digital contexts. International Journal of Information and Learning Technology, 35(2), 130–142. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJILT-09-2017-0084 Loughran, J. (2019). Pedagogical reasoning: the foundation of the professional knowledge of teaching. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 25(5), 523–535. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2019.1633294 Nilsson, P. (2009). From lesson plan to new comprehension: Exploring student teachers’ pedagogical reasoning in learning about teaching. European Journal of Teacher Education, 32(3), 239–258. https://doi.org/10.1080/02619760802553048 Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and Teaching: Foundations of the New Reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57(1). http://meridian.allenpress.com/her/article-pdf/57/1/1/2108782/haer_57_1_j463w79r56455411.pdf