2-Intellectual+Dimensions+of+Teaching

Teaching academic content is a critical primary responsibility of classroom teachers. Teachers must have their own relationship with the content they teach. Teachers must understand not only what they teach but also how those ideas are connected to other ideas both within the discipline and to other disciplines. But a teacher’s understanding of content differs from that of a disciplinary expert. Shulman (1986) suggested that in addition to traditional academic knowledge, teachers must have a special knowledge he referred to as “pedagogical content knowledge (PCK).” PCK is an amalgam of knowledge including a thorough knowledge of disciplinary knowledge as described above, how people come to know that knowledge (including the critical barriers they face in their attempts to learn), how that knowledge will be accepted in the students’ lives outside of school, and other things that influence how and what students learn in and out of school. We turn to these topics in the following sections.

//Traditional Academic Conten//t. Academic disciplines have two structures—substantive and syntactic—that describe the knowledge constructed in the discipline. The substantive structure includes the record of knowledge of a discipline. This knowledge is the agreed upon results of inquiry that have stood the test of other researchers and scholars in an academic discipline. The substantive structure of a discipline constantly changes as new knowledge is constructed that answers new questions or provides a better explanation than previous knowledge. Teachers must remain abreast of these changes and modify what they teach to reflect the changes in their disciplines. The syntactic structure deals with questions such as what constitutes legitimate knowledge, and includes the rules for creating, refuting, and accepting new knowledge in the discipline—in essence what scholars in a particular field do in their academic work.

Traditionally, PreK-12 teachers have focused on the substance of disciplines in their classrooms, almost to the exclusion of the syntax of academic disciplines. The traditional curriculum, developed by the “Committee of Ten” which had been convened by the National Education Association in 1892 at Harvard, has focused on students replicating the substance of academic disciplines. The results of this committee have shaped the curriculum in our schools for decades.

Recent calls for reform, however, have called for changes in what we teach. These calls place greater emphasis on creative and critical thinking in the disciplines. This conception of content in our schools is closer to what Dewey called a “progressive” curriculum; that is, a curriculum that places more emphasis on useable knowledge connected to students’ lives. Dewey was adamant, however, that students come to understand conventional academic knowledge, not merely develop a means of navigating their immediate surroundings. Although he argued that teachers should begin with students’ current conceptions of the content being taught, the ultimate goal was their understanding of traditional academic knowledge (Dewey, 1902). To facilitate their students’ meaningful understanding of content, teachers need to know the content in a way different from disciplinary experts. Dewey described it this way:

Every subject thus has two aspects: one for the scientist as scientist; the other for the teacher as a teacher. These two aspects are in no sense opposed or conflicting. But neither are they identical. For the scientist, the subject-matter represents simply a given body of truth to be employed in locating new problems, instituting new researches, and carrying them through to a verified outcome. To him the subject-matter of the science is self-contained. (Dewey, 1902/2001, p. 117) To Dewey, the scientist’s knowledge represents a territorial map of an academic discipline that shows the logical organization of knowledge. The map is the result of the scientists’ journey through the discipline—their experience. The final map, he inferred, is no substitute for the experience as the experience is where disciplinary experts make their initial connections among ideas.

The teacher’s job is to guide students through the territory using the map so that they may experience the discipline for themselves; that is, teachers must psychologize the discipline for their students. To accomplish that, teachers need to know the discipline in a different way. Dewey described that kind of knowing in this way:

The problem of the teacher is a different one. . . what concerns him, as teacher, is the ways in which the subject may become part of experience; what there is in the child’s present that is usable with reference to it; how such elements are to be used in interpreting the child’s needs and doings, and determine the medium in which the child should be placed in order that his growth may be properly directed. He is concerned, not with subject-matter as such, but with the subject-matter as a related factor in a total and growing experience (Dewey, 1902/2001 p. 117).

For Dewey, then, the logical organization shown in the map is the destination for all students, but the path they take to get there may vary depending on their “present”—the students current way of thinking and knowing about the topic being taught. The knowledge necessary to guide students through this territory (Shulman’s pedagogical content knowledge) includes an understanding of the “critical barriers” (Hawkins, 1974) that can hinder students’ learning. Over time, teachers develop an understanding of how children learn the content.

Teachers must understand that there are many aspects to the content they will teach, that they will emphasize different aspects at different times in their teaching. Various taxonomies have been developed to define the various aspects of the content taught in schools (Steiner, 1907; Bloom, 1956). They must understand that the content will change over time and that there are different perspectives on what content should be taught in our schools. Understanding the genesis of the traditional school curriculum and the influences that have modified our views of academic content allow students to come to an individual understanding of the content they teach.

But when we teach, we don’t merely teach content, we teach the content to a specific group of students at a specific time and place. Teachers must understand how their students come to learn the content they are exposed to in class.