Initial teacher education is the main opportunity to prepare pre-service preschool teachers to foster young children's science competences. Although initial teacher education is important for preschool teachers' later instruction in practice, little is known about early science education in initial teacher education. To gather first insights into…

In initial teacher education (ITE), preservice teachers acquire declarative knowledge in different knowledge domains: general pedagogy, content, and pedagogical content. To investigate how they use this knowledge in a school-related situation, n = 56 preservice teachers were asked to evaluate a peer's fictitious lesson plan. Their comments were…

This collection of papers presents essays by German scholars and practitioners writing from within the German Didaktik tradition and interpretive essays by U.S. scholars. After an introduction, "Starting a Dialogue: A Beginning Conversation between Didaktik and the Curriculum Traditions" (Stefan Hopmann and Kurt Riquarts), there are 18…