PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE IN HIGHER EDUCATION. A MULTIPLE CASE STUDY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

The present paper puts forward some of the processes and results of a research project aimed at studying and analysing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) (Shulman, 2005; Bolívar, 2005; Grossman, 2005; Marcelo, 2009) in university teaching staff.
This study is framed within a coordinated project EDU2008-05964-C03-01, financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation from the government of Spain, and where three Spanish universities participate: University of Barcelona, University of Santiago de Compostela and University of Sevilla.
Each of the three universities profound PCK’s analysis on one of university teachers’ development stage: novel (U. of Sevilla), intermediate (U. of Santiago de Compostela), and expert (University of Barcelona).
This paper is focused on the case of the University of Barcelona. Precisely, and within this case, it shows how highly-competent teaching professionals transform their disciplinary knowledge into accessible and comprehensible forms and structures for their students, and that this process is based on a kind of pedagogical reasoning —sometimes of intuitive nature —which allows them reorganizing and transforming their professional knowledge for teaching a particular subject, issue or topic. Research comprises two stages: 1) sample identification and selection: multiple sources and instruments were used for information collection with the aim of identifying a sample of teaching professionals at the University of Barcelona (UB) acknowledged for their high content preparation and command, as well as for their relevant capacity to encourage their students to learn; and 2) this second stage, posed as a multiple case study (Stake, 1998 ), focuses on analysing PCK signs in the teaching interactive stage (Jackson, 1998) of 3 widely-acknowledged UB teaching professionals. Taking classroom observation as the main data-collection strategy —yet considering the contributions of other instruments such as in-depth and group interviews —research provides relevant information about certain PCK signs in university teaching and the practical reasoning and theoretical fundamentals behind the teaching practice of the professionals who took part in the present study.
As far as the results are concerned, it is possible to show that the expertise, of these university teachers, is developed when:
- they not only dominate their own discipline but also when they have a huge, practical and experienced knowledge about their students and about the subject they teach.
- they anticipate and summarize their teaching knowledge within a web sequence
-they use didactic analogies and examples when they teach abstract content, looking forward to make them comprehensible for their students.