© IJARW | ISSN (O) - 2582-1008 July 2022 | Vol. 4 Issue. 1 www.ijarw.com IJARW1691 International Journal of All Research Writings 74 PRE-PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS’ PRACTICAL PEDAGOGICAL CONTENT KNOWLEDGE IN TEACHING AND LEARNING NUMERACY: A CASE OF NYARUGENGE DISTRICT Emeritha Mukandayambaje 1 , Dr. Jean Francois Maniraho 2 1 Student in Masters of Education in Mathematics education at African Centre of Excellence for Innovative Teaching and Learning Mathematics and Science/University of Rwanda, College of Education 2 Lecturer of Mathematics at African Centre of Excellence for Innovative Teaching and Learning Mathematics and Science/University of Rwanda, College of Education ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to explore the pre-primary school teachers’ practical pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in teaching and learning numeracy. The purposive sampling method was used to choose three teachers from pre-primary schools of Nyarugenge District to participate in this study. Data were collected through questionnaires and video recordings of the lessons and they were thematically analysed based on the PCK sub-categories which are Knowledge of Content and Curriculum (KCC), Knowledge of Content and Student (KCS), and Knowledge of Content and Teaching (KCT). The findings of this study reveal that pre-primary school teachers’ high PCK was obtained through their knowledge of content and teaching (KCT) rather than other two PCK sub-categories. This study recommends Pre-primary teachers to focus on the curriculum syllabus to improve their knowledge of content and curriculum (KCC), as it was highlighted that they have low PCK through their knowledge of content and curriculum. Keyword: numeracy, pedagogical content knowledge, pre-primary teachers, teaching and learning. 1. INTRODUCTION None can offer what s/he does not have (Maniraho & Christiansen, 2015). If a teacher wants to show to the learners one cup of water, s/he should have one bucket of water of her/his own (An et al., 2004). Since it is known that pre- primary education has a purpose to prepare children to avoid their poor performance in their primary education and other high levels of education (Haque et al., 2013), pre-primary teachers require a special kind of knowledge to provide effective teaching. However, effective teaching requires well-trained teachers in what and how to teach young children. Pedagogical content knowledge was found to be a teachers’ knowledge of blending the content being taught into a form that is understandable to children (Shulman, 1987). In Rwanda, a small number of studies were conducted on teachers’ knowledge (Uworwabayeho, 2009). In addition, Benegusenga et al. (2017) confirmed that the Rwandan education system has not been focused on the training of pre-primary teachers. To date, there is no study in Rwanda, to the best of our knowledge, which has examined the pre-primary teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge in mathematics. All these, have been raising our interest to undertake this study. Practical PCK covers all teachers’ activities that help teachers to appropriately react to children’s questions and mistakes during teaching classroom lesson. However, in most of countries, there is no study conducted on pre-primary teachers’ practical PCK as it is shown in different studies (Lee, 2010; Zhang, 2015; Tian & Huang, 2019). Therefore, this gap also plays a significant factor that leads us to conduct this study. 2. LITERATURE REVIEW The pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) was initially introduced by Shulman (1986) and was defined as the teacher’s knowledge of how to break down the subject to make it more comprehensible to learners (Shulman, 1987). In his model, Shulman (1986) described how teachers can use analogies, representations, illustrations, demonstrations, and give examples and explanations about the subject matter to be taught to effectively offer it to learners. He introduced a model of teacher knowledge which