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…

This paper is based on my own practice as a teacher educator at a university in the north-east of England and focuses on the effectiveness of dialogue as a tool for teaching the topic of socio-economic disadvantage in initial teacher education (ITE). The research was triggered by questions which had emerged within my work, about the compatibility…

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…