Book Reviews: Teachers’ Special Knowledge

I n his 1985 AERA presidential address (Shulman, 1986), Lee Shulman tossed off the phrase "pedagogical content knowledge" and sparked a small cottage industry devoted to the scholarly elaboration of the construct in a number of different teaching fields and the reengineering of teacher education programs to include it. In that address, Shulman was proposing a theoretical framework that would reintegrate teachers' knowledge of their subject matter into our view of the knowledge that teachers use in their teaching, teachers' content knowledge having been largely ignored during the years of "process-product" research on teaching and by initial cognitive-scienceoriented investigations of teachers' planning and instruction. In Shulman's formulation, teachers need pedagogical knowledge, deep knowledge of the subject itself, and knowledge of curricular goals and available materials. In addition, they need a particular form of content knowledge that deals with its teachability, including the most useful forms of representation and an understanding of what makes the learning of specific topics easy or difficult (Shulman, 1986). Tantalizingly ambiguous in its original formulation, and opening new space in the conceptual landscape, pedagogical content knowledge was "that special amalgam of content and pedagogy that is uniquely the province of teachers, their own special form of professional understanding" (Shulman, 1987, p. 8). The work to develop a theoretical framework was part of a Stanfordbased research program, "Knowledge Growth in Teaching, “ which sought to define and examine the underlying knowledge base for teaching. This generative research program has produced a substantial number of papers, doctoral theses, young scholars who have been working through the details of this program and moving it beyond its original formulation, and appropriation of its concepts by other researchers (e.g., see Borko et al., 1992; Carpenter, Fennema, Peterson, & Carey, 1988). Pam Grossman's book, The Making of a Teacher: Teacher Knowledge and Teacher Education, is the first full-length work to emerge from this group. In this book Grossman aims to characterize the pedagogical content knowledge of six first-year high school English teachers and to trace its sources. Grossman does not claim generalizability to large numbers of teachers, but develops a deep and highly textured picture of the content and structure of the knowledge that these particular teachers use to guide their teaching, elaborating along the way the concept of pedagogical content knowledge itself. Grossman also places her study in a policy frame, exploring the relationship between professional knowledge and professional education. Noting the generally poor repute of "methods courses" and the popularity at the time of a number of "alternate routes" to teacher certification that were designed to ameliorate the teacher shortage by injecting into teaching well-educated candidates who had not had teacher education courses, Grossman designed her study to contrast teachers with and without professional education, attempting to understand what value, if any, was added through subject-specific pedagogical course work when teachers were already well prepared in their subject matter. The presentation is thorough and the research at times elegant. Grossman's six teachers all have first-rate undergraduate majors in English. Three participated in the same teacher education program and three entered teaching without formal professional training. Grossman did case studies of the six teachers and a cross-case analysis. Data for the case studies came from observations of their classroom teaching and five in-depth, semistructured interviews, which included open-ended discussion; card sorts to capture the teachers' concepts of English and English teaching and the sources of those concepts; planning exercises designed to distinguish between a pedagogical orientation and a canonical, disciplinary construct for teaching; a planning exercise as a probe for knowledge of student understanding, curricular knowledge, and conceptions of teaching poetry; and a retrospective interview on the teaching of Shakespeare, which, coincidentally, all six teachers did in their first year of teaching. Grossman also collected data on the teacher education program from which three of the teachers graduated by observing the curriculum and instruction courses in English, albeit not at the time the teachers were enrolled.