Ingenjörens väg till klassrummet - KPU-studenters uppfattningar om teknikämnets innehåll och undervisningspraktik

Abstract

Aim The aim of this study is to investigate how KPU students with an engineering back ground perceive the purpose and content of technology education in compulsory and up per secondary school, how they relate their own subject knowledge and professional ex periences to school technology education, and how they describe the development of technology-specific pedagogical content knowledge during teacher education. Theory The study is theoretically grounded in theories of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), drawing on Shulman’s (1986) original conceptualisation and Carlson et al.’s (2019) Refined Consensus Model. Particular attention is given to personal PCK (pPCK), understood as the individual subject-specific pedagogical competence that develops through education, experience, and reflection. The study also draws on Nordlöf et al.’s (2021) epistemological framework for technology education. Together, these perspec tives are used to analyse both how different forms of technological knowledge are articulated in the students’ reasoning and how technical expertise is transformed into knowledge for teaching. Method The study adopts a qualitative research approach and is based on semi-structured inter views with nine KPU students with an engineering background at three Swedish higher education institutions. The interviews were analysed using directed content analysis, sup ported by a coding framework derived from the study’s theoretical framework. Results The findings show that the purpose of technology education is largely understood through a practical and problem-solving perspective, where technical skills and techno logical-scientific knowledge are given prominence. Socio-ethical perspectives are recog nised as important but are generally given less emphasis in the participants’ descriptions. An engineering background emerges as an important resource that provides subject-re lated confidence and professional experience. At the same time, the findings indicate that technical expertise does not automatically translate into teaching competence. Instead, participants describe a need to delimit, reinterpret, and transform their technical knowledge in relation to students’ prior knowledge, learning processes, and the aims of technology education. The development of subject-specific pedagogical competence is described as an ongoing process in which technical expertise is gradually integrated with knowledge about teach ing and student learning. Drawing on Carlson et al.’s (2019) concept of personal PCK (pPCK), this process can be understood as the development of an emerging subject-spe cific pedagogical competence during the transition from engineer to teacher. The findings further indicate that this development involves not only didactical learning but also a re negotiation of professional identity. The study contributes knowledge about how KPU students with an engineering back ground develop subject-specific pedagogical competence and how prior technical exper tise interacts with the pedagogical and didactical demands of technology education.