This study contributes to teacher educators' pedagogical content knowledge by drawing on phenomenography-variation theory to (i) research and describe qualitative differences in Beginner Teachers' conceptions of pupils' understandings of subject content and, (ii) provide evidence of the effectiveness of an instructional strategy that might be…

Pre-service teacher education in England has been essentially school-based since 1992. The article offers a critique of this design from the perspective of a practitioner and researcher working in one of its most influential schemes. The fundamental problem described concerns an impoverished understanding of experience that underpins how beginning…

Almost a decade ago, the new subject of citizenship was created in the English National Curriculum and several universities were funded to train teachers in this new subject. This presented a rare challenge, namely how to train people to teach a subject that did not exist in schools, and in which they were unlikely to have a specialist degree. In…