Primary teacher educators’ perception of desired and achieved pedagogical content knowledge in geography education in primary teacher training

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a study conducted among primary geography teacher educators. The research examines the perceptions of educators of primary teacher students' desired and achieved levels of substantial knowledge, syntactic knowledge, and beliefs about the subject of geography. The findings indicate that primary teacher educators do not view their students as having significant knowledge about geography. They believe their students have better syntactic knowledge and beliefs about the subject of geography, however. Teacher educators believe that more hours of teaching and more attention to subject knowledge could raise the quality of primary teacher training in geography.

Comparison Between Primary Teacher Educators’ and Primary School Teachers’ Beliefs of Primary Geography Education Quality

“…The reduction of education time for geography is also found for primary school teacher training institutes. More than four to ten teacher educators believe that after 2000 less education time was spent on geography (Blankman, van der Schee, Volman, & Boogaard, 2015). In line with the difference in education time, in The Netherlands the number of teacher educators who are geography specialists is limited compared to the number of teacher educators who are arithmetic of native language specialists.…”

“…An issue to address is the doubt of teacher educators regarding the suitability of primary schools as a daily practical training institute for future teachers in case of geography education as complementary to the University of applied Science training institute (Blankman et al 2015). Conversely, a possible doubt of primary school teachers regarding the lack of primary education experience of teacher educators in teaching geography in primary schools also has to be addressed.…”

“…As a supposed effect, relatively limited curriculum attention is devoted to preparing pre-service school teachers to teach non-core subjects compared to core subjects. Dutch teacher educators criticise their primary pre-service teachers' lack of geography content knowledge and to a lesser extent their lack of pedagogical content knowledge (Blankman et al, 2015). Teach educators reported that less than 3/10 primary pre-service teachers were able to pinpoint 300 topographic names (selected for primary education) on a map at the end of their training.…”

“…Concerning pedagogical content knowledge, teacher educators believe that about six out of ten of their primary pre-service teachers teach pupils to ask geographic questions, teach pupils to approach the world around them from different perspectives, and use maps and atlases during their practice in primary school. Dutch teacher educators are also concerned about the lack of professional examples of geography lessons within primary schools (Blankman et al, 2015).…”

Not nearly enough geography! University provision for England’s pre-service primary teachers

“…As elsewhere in the world, research into geography in primary ITE has been neglected in the United Kingdom. Primary ITE courses in Ireland and The Netherlands contain geography components (Waldron, Pike, Greenwood, Murphy, O'Connor, Dolan & Kerr, 2009;Blankman, van der Schee, Volman & Boogaard, 2015), but in both countries time to develop pre-service primary teachers' geographical knowledge and teaching is reported to be constrained, and researchers state that much more needs to be investigated. In the USA approaches in ITE to teach elementary school geography are even less clear, because geography is included only as a component of the social studies curriculum, and is yet to be investigated informatively (Womac, 2014).…”