THE ORIGIN AND ACQUISITION OF PCK FOR TEACHING SCIENCE: A CASE OF PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ PLANNING TO TEACH UNFORESEEN TOPICS IN LIFE AND NATURAL SCIENCES

This study investigated the origin and acquisition of student teachers' PCK for teaching natural and Life sciences.Shulman's PCK, pedagogical action and reasoning; and the theory about students' preferred learning styles were used as theoretical lenses that guided this inquiry.The students were taught how to apply the knowledge bases for teaching (as propounded by Shulman, 1986) during the teaching of Natural and Life Sciences.Five topics from each subject were used to model teaching based on the knowledge bases and the students were expected to extrapolate that learning across how to teach other topics in the South African CAPS syllabus document.The students were then given random other topics not taught how to teach for them to design a lesson plan that entailed the application of the different knowledge bases for teaching.The focus of this research approach was to find out what informs the pedagogical reasoning of the student teachers when planning to teach a topic not prior taught about how to teach it.Collected data included student teachers' lesson plans on topics randomly assigned to them and interview transcripts from three students selected for in-depth investigation.This study established and added a new dimension that whilst the general understanding is that the PCK for teaching science is acquired mainly through formal teacher training and during in-service practising after training, the impactful PCK for teaching science is also acquired and conceptualised during years of students' being taught and learning of science subject content (coined entrenched or engrained PCK for teaching science).The findings from this inquiry help to inform the recommendations that educators of science subject content at any level ought to model good science teaching as this is a powerful way of entrenching PCK for science teaching; so that the vicious cycle of poor teaching is broken and not passed from teacher to student, and then from the 'new teacher who was a student' to 'new student'.