Building pedagogical content knowledge in visual arts curricular didactic: an empirical study

This paper focuses on the relevance of building “pedagogical content knowledge” (PCK) (Shulman, 1986, ) during the training of Portuguese visual arts teachers. Visual arts teachers in Portugal are visual artists who do not explicitly acquire, during their formal education, a pedagogical knowledge of what they are meant to teach. The gap between artistic knowledge and pedagogical knowledge has always characterized Portuguese visual arts teacher education (Sousa, 2007). In order to help student-teachers to bridge this gap, some workshops were designed to promote PCK, based on a constructivist view. In this paper we present those workshops and the findings we achieved.