Choosing Content and Methods: Focus Group Interviews with Faculty Teachers in Norwegian Pre-Service Subject Teacher Education in Design, Art, and Crafts

Abstract

The study is aimed at generating knowledge on how faculty teachers reflect and justify their choice of subject content logic in teacher education, exemplified by a concurrent pre-service Subject Teacher Education in design, art, and crafts. Focus-group interviews generated data. Three topics were discussed: too many choices, different logics, and avoiding confrontation. Faculty teachers expressed various understandings of content knowledge (CK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), linked to the teachers' intuitive and reasoned reflections and preconceptions through the anchoring effect and attribute substitution. The study contributes to the knowledge base by reframing problematic sides of education, and by expanding the understanding of CK and conditions for PCK by exploring the thread between educational psychologist Lee Shulman and psychologist Daniel Kahneman.