INTRODUCTION

The idea of ‘powerful knowledge’ is heavily associated with the scholarship, students and interlocuters of Michael Young (e.g. 2009, 2013a, 2013b). It has generated much debate in recent years in the field of education, including in geography education. While it is an attractive and promising idea, it can also be subject to critique. In this paper we explore the main lines of critique by way of the following questions:

1. What is meant by powerful knowledge for teachers and students?

2. What is powerful geographical knowledge?

3. What might a powerful geography education be? 

4. How might we evaluate the claim that it powerful knowledge benefits students of geography in schools?

Our full paper is structured into four corresponding sections. Each section presents a synthesis of the debates and contributions that have been made in recent years regarding the meaning of powerful knowledge and its use and development in the field of geography education. (llustrative extracts are included below.)

The first section introduces the origin of the concept of ‘powerful knowledge’ and includes the main criticisms raised in debate in recent years (e.g. Beck 2013, Biesta 2014, Young et al. 2015, Muller & Young 2015, Deng 2021, 2022). The next provides a contemporary definition of what the notion of ‘powerful geographical knowledge’ implies (see Béneker & van der Vaart 2020, Bladh 2020, Roberts 2014), including its relevance to companion fields, such as environmental and sustainability education (see Mitchell 2022, Reid 2018). The third focuses on whether and how we can talk about a powerful geography education (drawing on Biddulph et al. 2020, Boehm et al 2018, Maude 2018, Slater et al. 2016). The fourth includes the importance of research on students’ learning and how teaching and curriculum are decisive for concluding that the knowledge they may deploy or acquire is ‘powerful’ (Bouwmans & Béneker 2018, Catling & Martin, 2017, Hordern 2021, Gericke et al. 2018, Virranmäki 2022). 

ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF ‘POWERFUL KNOWLEDGE’

For this proposal, we note Young (2009) approached the concept from a curriculum studies perspective in an effort to restore attention to the importance of knowledge in curriculum development and learning, e.g. during 'curriculum making' by practitioners. A key argument revolves around the fundamental role that an agreed curriculum (e.g. national or state), plays in promoting social justice, as well as framing who makes curriculum within particulary parameters, or tries to subvert or repurpose this (Roberts 2014). According to Young, while there are young people who, due to their particular social situation and standing, will have access to knowledge, there are others who will not (see Deng 2022). Therefore, the school has a duty to combat this inequality by offering all students access to the best possible knowledge, in others words, a 'powerful knowledge' that is true, trustworthy, and valuable.

Much of the academic debate about powerful knowledge has focused on elucidating what is meant by ‘powerful’, critiquing that and suggesting alternatives. Young (2014, 74), for example, distinguished three characteristics of powerful knowledge: 1) It is different from everyday knowledge, 2) It is produced in specialized scientific communities; and 3) It is systematically categorized into the concepts that are part of the disciplines. For Young (2013b), it is necessary to recover the content of the subjects and teach the most strategic and valuable knowledge of each discipline so that students can gain an idea of how the world works. Muller and Young (2019) state that this knowledge can be found in school subjects since these are taught according to the canons of their reference disciplines, and thus create a 'knowledge-rich curriculum' too. 

For geography education, Maude (2016) suggests this should be both grounded and pushed further by focusing attention on the quality of knowledge and whether it is reliable, fallible, and demonstrable. Moreover, in relation to quality, powerful knowledge should be the best knowledge that has been generated so far in each discipline to explain reality that can be comprehended and engaged at school level. A second way to explain powerful knowledge then is through what it allows students who possess it to do in a shared reality – the sphere of social justice. Criticisms of this conception centred around curricular aspects include the lack of specificity (Slater et al 2015); ambiguities in the terms and relations between powerful, systematic and specialised (Hordern 2021); the risk of depersonalising what is learnt by diverse students (Catling & Martin 2017) and downplaying personal knowledge and experience (Roberts 2014). TOWARDS DEFINING A POWERFUL GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION Béneker and Van Der Vaart (2020) affirm that geographical knowledge offers a set of essential “lenses” to look at and interpret the world around us, a theme familiar to the Geocapabilities project (Mitchell 2022). It provides a necessary perspective to understand many of the world's great problems and phenomena. In light of this, Maude (2018) proposes a powerful school geographical education fosters geographical knowledge that: - provides students with new ways of thinking about the world, - allows us to understand, explain and analyse the world in a powerful way, - gives students a certain power over their own knowledge, - allows people to participate in debates on significant problems, at all scales (from local, to national and global), - shows how the world works (e.g. economically, politically, socially and environmentally). In other words, engagement with powerful geographical knowledge makes possible the discovery of new ways of thinking; a better understanding and explanations of how natural systems and society work; and thinking about alternative futures, including what we can do to influence them, having power over what one knows, and being able to participate in important debates that go beyond one's own personal experience, situation and horizons. ...

Combining this with Virranmäki (2022), we can anticipate classroom and fieldwork activities in geography education designed and structured around outcomes involving creating, applying, analysing, evaluating and understanding. These necessitate engaging students in assessing (i) current and new ways of thinking about the world and their worlds, (ii) tools for explaining how the world works, (iii) the power they have through a geographical education to go beyond what they already know, (iv) the capabilities that have to argue, debate and participate in the resolution of significant issues at all scales. SUBJECT-BASED AND ADJECTIVAL EDUCATIONS As discussed elsewhere, we note these features are also expected in quality environmental and sustainability education (Reid 2018). They are also recommended as features in UNESCO (2021) "Learn for Our Planet. Act for Responsibility. Berlin Declaration on Education for Sustainable Development", and UNESCO's (2017) "Education for Sustainable Development Goals: learning objectives", but neither reference a powerful knowledge framework as a key method, facilitator or priority for curriculum development ... CONCLUSIONS Biesta (2015) proposes the idea that we move from a vision of survival to that of living with meaning when assessing 'why teaching matters'. In this, education could be deemed 'powerful' if students are involved in their learning, but it also requires them to be interested in what they learn, involved in decisions about what they learn, and developing agency in the learning process. In short, what counts as powerful education is the ability to live in a dynamic world as an engaged and engaging global citizen, where connections are created between acquired knowledge and scales of analysis, as well as interconnections between people and spaces. For geography in schools, it is about developing skills and competencies to understand oneself, the places diverse people occupy in society and environments, as well as understanding other people and cultures. ...

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