The structure of teacher knowledge in religious education. A qualitative reconstruction of the knowledge teachers refer to in planning religious education

Professional knowledge is a prominent topic of research in subject specific didactics that originated from mathematics education. In the discourse on religious education, however, there are no empirical studies to reconstruct such knowledge bottom-up from religion teachers’ practice. This paper addresses that desideratum and investigates the suitability of the concept of professional knowledge for religious education. Theoretically based on Baumert and Kunter’s structural model of teacher knowledge (2006) and empirically conducted through Problem-Centered Interviews (Witzel 2000) with three religion teachers after planning an instructional sequence on Jesus Christ it elaborates a tentative structural model of religion teacher knowledge. According to the empirical results reconstructed by Qualitative Content Analysis (Mayring 2000), the concept of CK has to be amended by an epistemological dimension. PCK in the domain of religious education is more about instructional principles than instructional strategies and includes the teachers’ perspective on the instructed topic. In consequence, the tentative structural model of religions teacher knowledge supports the assumption that such knowledge is domain specific.