M. Boogaard

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

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.

Learning to teach geography for primary education: results of an experimental programme

Abstract Students training to become primary school teachers appear to have little awareness of the core concepts of geography (teaching). To ensure that future primary school teachers are able to develop their pupils’ geographical awareness, a six weeks programme was developed. The characteristics of this programme – named Consciously Teaching Geography (CTG) – are: principles of good geography teaching, conjunction and a recurrent structure during training, modelling and reflection. In a quasi-experimental research design the question is answered what the effects are of CTG on the development of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) for the subject of geography of first year primary student teachers. The results indicated that the programme has a positive effect on the domain-specific PCK development in the short term.