Specific pedagogical content reasoning

The concept of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) has had a major influence on research on science teacher knowledge and thinking in the past 25 years. However, PCK has shown to be a difficult concept to characterize and thus it has been the subject of diverse interpretations. In this paper I present a personal reflection about both the nature of PCK and its usefulness in the characterization of teacher thinking. In particular, I discuss the need for shifting our efforts from cataloguing teacher knowledge about teaching a particular subject to characterizing teachers' specific pedagogical content reasoning (SPCR) as they face specific pedagogical tasks in diverse contexts.