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Department of Physical and Astronomical Sciences- University of Palermo, Italy
GIREP Seminar
2003
The paper describes the guidelines of a Italian research project, involving 8 research groups of different Universities. The project is in progress and its purpose is twofold: -from a theoretical point of view, to gain a better understanding of factors which either promote or hinder the development of teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), - to contribute to the research-based design of pre-service physics teacher education courses. The main focus is on the knowledge transformation process and on the cognitive strategies used to make prospective teachers aware of different categories of physics understanding within the domain of modelling physical phenomena. The theoretical underpinnings of teaching strategies, pedagogical materials and tools, implemented in well defined Units for Teacher Preparation are described and some preliminary results are reported. The adequacy and depth of prospective teachers' subject-matter understanding are analyzed. Implications about the ways to implement adequate interfaces between prospective teachers' subject-matter and pedagogical content knowledge are induced. The strategy rests on the observation that transformation is not a unidirectional process from subject-matter knowledge to pedagogical content knowledge as the literature suggests.