Teaching development grants final and financial report: Enhancing the relationship of teaching and learning: What is the knowledge base of teaching and how can it facilitate learning?

The relation of teaching and learning rests on how theories can be linked to practice. Very often, teaching theories emerge and vary in quite a number of ways and they do not readily respond to what students need to know. With this in mind, Shulman and his associates at Stanford University have worked on a practical way of approaching subject matter, school curriculum and pedagogy with an emphasis of "pedagogical content knowledge" (see Grossman, Wilson and Shulman, 1989; Wilson, Shulman and Richert, 1987) which has groomed during the last two decades. In substance, Shulman highlighted four sources of knowledge base of teaching: (1) scholarship in content disciplines, (2) the materials and settings of the institutionalized educational process (for example, curricula, textbooks, school organizations and finance, and the structure of the teaching profession), (3) research on teaching, social and cultural phenomena that affect what teachers can do, and (4) the wisdom of practice itself (Shulman, 1987). In this study, Shulman's framework is adapted and used for developing the knowledge base of teaching in the newly implemented 335 curriculum which requires new teaching and learning. Theory and practice will be linked by academics' input of the new curriculum in the in-service and pre-service courses and followed by student teachers' application of their knowledge in their school contexts during teaching practice. Through in-depth investigations, the study aims to develop a useful pool of cases of how teachers will transform their knowledge in real contexts.