PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION
Year: 2017
Editor: Berg, Arild; Bohemia, Erik; Buck, Lyndon; Gulden, Tore; Kovacevic, Ahmed; Pavel, Nenad
Author: Juuti, Tero Sakari; Rättyä, Kaisu; Lehtonen, Timo; Kopra, Miia-Johanna
Series: E&PDE
Institution: 1: Tampere University of Technology, Finland; 2: University of Eastern Finland
Section: Assessment Methods in Design Education
Page(s): 483-488
ISBN: 978-1-904670-84-1
Abstract
The Finnish education policy has changed in recent years and poses challenging goals for university education. In the product development domain this means that teaching needs to produce more competent practitioners for the industry than before, at reduced cost. Our long-term goal is to improve product development education, and in this paper we focus on capturing teacher knowledge that has an impact on students’ learning. The purpose of this paper is to describe the first prototype of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in product development. This research makes use of the educational design research (EDR) strategy. Three experienced teachers completed questionnaires and participated in discussion based on the answers. The prototype was developed jointly, and the importance of PCK in teaching was discussed. PCK as framework was seen as useful during the process, as it facilitated capturing and structuring the tacit teacher knowledge on product development. The PCK does not consider the aspects of shared knowledge of teachers or the process of continuous learning and organisational learning. We believe that in the future, the knowledge of product development teaching could be developed further in the direction of a continuous learning process by integrating PCK with processes and practices of organisational learning. The role of teachers’ PCK in facilitating good learning results also needs to be studied further.
Keywords: Pedagogical Content Knowledge, Product Development