Content area
Full Text
Margaret discusses the five ways in which she believes geographical education can be powerful.
Introduction
In making a case for a subject-based curriculum, Michael Young (2008; 2015) coined the term 'powerful knowledge': knowledge developed within academic disciplines that most students would not have access to beyond school. Young's ideas have stimulated considerable discussion about the significance of 'powerful knowledge'. I have discussed his ideas elsewhere (Roberts, 2013a; 2014). In this article I want to present my own ideas of ways in which I think geographical education as a whole could be powerful.
1.... it enables students to make connections between their everyday knowledge and school geography
Vygotsky, through his research into children's learning in the 1920s, distinguished between two types of knowledge. He used the terms 'spontaneous' for concepts children developed through experience without instruction and 'scientific' for concepts related to academic disciplines and acquired with the support of a teacher. He found that the development of both types of concept were 'closely connected': children's acquisition of abstract disciplinary concepts grew out of related everyday concepts, and the structures provided by disciplinary concepts enabled children's everyday concepts to develop 'towards conscious and deliberate use' (Vygotsky, 1962).
Vygotsky's ideas have been very influential on education generally and everyday knowledge has been recognised as valuable at all stages of geographical education. Within the context of primary education, Catling and Martin (2011) argue that pupils' everyday knowledge and disciplinary knowledge should both be regarded as powerful. They cite research that shows everyday knowledge is not necessarily naive and unsystematic, but that it can be rational, coherent and structured. When the two types of powerful knowledge, the everyday and the disciplinary, are brought together in the classroom, children can develop new knowledge and understanding.
At secondary level, everyday knowledge has been an essential part of several Geographical Association (GA) projects. For example, 'Valuing Places' aimed to develop students' understanding of global connectedness by building on their personal geographies of place. The Young People's Geographies Project started with the view that students bring to school valid and important knowledge based on their interests and their needs. Furthermore, the GA identifies 'student experiences' as one of the three key ingredients in the process of 'curriculum making'. At university level, an...