This symposium arises from the work of the KOSS Network: "Knowledge and Quality across School Subjects and Teacher Education/Kunskap och kvalitet i skolämnen och lärarutbildning" which has been funded by the Swedish Research Council (2019-22). The network brings together cross-disciplinary educational research groups from Sweden, England and Finland specialising in different school subjects. The aim of the research programme is to study how content knowledge in different school subjects is defined and transformed, taking a comparative perspective across education systems in three national contexts: Sweden, England and Finland. By using the theoretical concepts of “powerful knowledge” (Young, 2015; Young and Muller, 2010), “epistemic quality” (Hudson, 2018) and “transformation” (Gericke et al., 2018) we study how these concepts form knowledge of importance for subject didactics and how this can be developed within teacher education. A central issue for this research programme is to explore how transformation processes can enable knowledge of high epistemic quality to be taught in school classrooms. These questions form the point of departure for what can be regarded as teachers’ powerful professional knowledge. The concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ (Young, 2015; Young and Muller, 2010) was developed as a means of restoring the importance of knowledge and teaching in curriculum development and research and as a way of overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory (Young, 2013). Based on their three futures scenarios, their preferred Future 3 (Young and Muller, 2010) recognises the ‘differentiatedness’ of knowledge which is central to addressing the need for “equalising epistemological access” to the curriculum.

The concept of “epistemic quality” in school mathematics (Hudson, 2018; 2019) relates to the quality of education in terms of what the students are expected to know, make sense of and be able to do through the school mathematics curriculum. This discussion is founded on the analysis of a distinction between “mathematical fallibilism” based on a heuristic view of mathematics as a creative human activity and “mathematical fundamentalism” which reflects a transposed and impoverished view of the nature of mathematics that is reduced to memorised and imitative algorithmic reasoning and computational practice. Similarly, in history, one can contrast low epistemic quality approaches to learning about the past that do not – and high epistemic quality approaches that do – engage pupils in the key component processes of historical reasoning (Seixas and Morton, 2013). The concept of “transformation” (Gericke et al., 2018) is seen as an integrative process through which specialized knowledge, developed in subject disciplines, is reshaped and re-presented in educational environments – through various processes outside and within the education system at individual, institutional and societal levels – as bodies and forms of knowledge to be taught and learned. Such processes of transformation are apparent in concepts related to a number of different frameworks, including ‘transposition’ (Chevallard, 2007), ‘omstilling’ (Ongstad, 2006) and ‘re-contextualisation’ Bernstein (1971).

The specific research questions that will be addressed by this research programme will be interpreted from a comparative perspective between countries. The research questions are:

1. How can the nature of powerful knowledge and epistemic quality in different school subjects be characterized?

2. How can the transformation processes related to powerful knowledge and epistemic quality be described?

3. How can the nature of teachers’ powerful professional knowledge be characterized and what are the implications for teacher education policy and practice?

Chevallard, Y. (2007) Readjusting Didactics to a Changing Epistemology, European Educational Research Journal 6(2), 131–134. Gericke, N., Hudson, B., Olin-Scheller, C. and Stolare, M. (2018) Powerful Knowledge, Transformations and the Need for Empirical Studies across School Subjects, London Review of Education: Special Issue on Knowledge and Subject Specialist Teaching, Vol. 16, Issue 3, 428-444. UCL IOE Press. https://doi.org/10.18546/LRE.16.3.06 Hudson, B. (2019) Epistemic Quality for Equitable Access to Quality Education in School Mathematics, Journal of Curriculum Studies, (In press) Hudson, B. (2018) Powerful Knowledge and Epistemic Quality in School Mathematics, London Review of Education: Special Issue on Knowledge and Subject Specialist Teaching, Vol. 16, Issue 3, 384-397. UCL IOE Press. https://doi.org/10.18546/LRE.16.3.03 Ongstad, S. (Ed.) (2006) Fag og didaktikk i lærerutdanning: kunnskap i grenseland, Universitetsforlaget, Oslo. Seixas, P. and Morton, T. (2013). The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts. Toronto: Nelson. Young, M. (2015) Powerful knowledge as curriculum principle. In M. Young, D. Lambert, C.R. Roberts, and M.D. Roberts, Knowledge and the future school: Curriculum and social justice, 65–88, 2nd edition. Bloomsbury Academic, London. Young, M. (2013) Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: a knowledge-based approach, Journal of Curriculum Studies 45(2), 101–118. Young, M., & Muller, J. (2010). Three educational scenarios for the future: Lessons from the sociology of knowledge, European Journal of Education, 45, 11–27.