Conference Agenda

This proposal is the result of an analysis and comparison of the types of knowledge present in the curricular programmes of two subjects from different areas of the Portuguese upper secondary education system (ranging from the 10th to the 12th grade): biology and geology (integrated subjects merged in one in the 10th and 11th grades) and history. In addition to this analysis, we sought to understand the extent to which teaching and learning practices align with curriculum guidelines and how these dynamics affect student learning and access to powerful knowledge and, inherently, powerful thinking.

This study is part of a broader research project that sought to assess how certain curricular and didactic provisions and dynamics promote or condition academic success in two subjects from different areas and originating from distinct knowledge structures.

This more specific study was inspired by the work of Gericke et al., who developed a framework for curricular analysis of powerful knowledge in biology by comparing the national curricula of England, Finland, and Sweden. In this context, we used the theoretical-methodological model proposed by the authors to categorize the knowledge present in the curriculum content and compare the curriculum programmes of the two subjects.

The curricula for subjects in Portugal are organised into thematic blocks or domains. Within each organisational block, there is content, designated as essential learning outcomes (knowledge, skills, and attitudes) that students must acquire (the ‘what’). There is also another section containing strategic teaching actions geared towards the subject (the ‘how’). The study focused precisely on these two elements: content and teaching actions. Note that the study goes beyond the analysis of curriculum texts and complements it with an analysis of teaching practices related to one of these organisational blocks. This would make it possible to reflect on curricular guidelines and their didactic realisation from a perspective related to their potential as drivers of powerful knowledge.

Reflections on how knowledge and school teaching and learning can promote (or hinder) social justice, fair equality of opportunities, social mobility, and the empowerment of young students have been widely discussed in the education field. It is within this debate that the concept of powerful knowledge emerged, widely disseminated by Young, Muller, and other social realist scholars. The social realists argue that some knowledge is better (epistemically, morally, aesthetically) and more universal than others. In this line, Young and Muller differentiate knowledge from our opinions or experience because it explicitly recognises a relationship to a reality that is independent of us, deepening, in a sense, the distinction between disciplinary knowledge and everyday knowledge. Thus, all students should have equal access to this powerful knowledge. It is powerful knowledge insofar as it provides students with intellectual powers that enable them to achieve and develop powerful thinking.

So, powerful knowledge is specialised, systematised knowledge that is subject to continuous systematic review in socio-epistemic formations, such as scientific and professional communities, with review processes that are open to innovation and new perspectives and with the effective engagement of the agents involved in these formations. In other words, agency and transformative potential are inherent to the concept. In educational terms, powerful knowledge can be more effectively introduced into schools through a subject-based curriculum, whose content originates from the recontextualisation of its closest parent academic discipline. Thus, this knowledge, powerful due to its reliability, fallibility, and testability, could empower young people to better understand the world and to think beyond their everyday experiences to envisage alternatives.

Based on these considerations and this theoretical and methodological background, we propose to assess the powerful potential of these two school subjects in Portugal.

Across curriculum studies and subject didactics, 'powerful knowledge' has become a widely adopted concept for arguing that schooling should provide students with access to specialised disciplinary knowledge. Developed from a sociological perspective of curriculum, 'powerful knowledge' highlights the educational value of specialised, systematic knowledge produced and validated within disciplinary communities (Young & Muller, 2013). Such knowledge is believed to help learners move beyond their everyday experience by enabling more reliable explanations and by opening up alternative ways of thinking (Muller & Young, 2019). The idea of powerful knowledge has significantly influenced the 'knowledge turn' in global educational landscapes, from policymaking to teaching practices (Béneker et al., 2024; Deng, 2025), from its main origin (England), spreading through broader Europe, and increasingly to other continents (e.g., Bertram, 2019; Hu & Wang, 2025; Maude, 2015).

Despite its significance for bringing disciplinary knowledge back into school, powerful knowledge has faced persistent critiques. A long-standing concern is that it tends to undervalue everyday knowledge, related to the broader critique about separating curriculum from pedagogy (Alderson, 2020; Roberts, 2014). At the same time, the literature engaging with powerful knowledge has mainly focused on curriculum principles, policy, and teachers' practices. What remains much less visible is research on the learner's starting point — what students actually bring, and how their existing knowledge relates to the disciplinary knowledge they are expected to learn (Firth, 2018; Whittall, 2021).

This study addresses the pedagogical gap of powerful knowledge. Our starting premise is that it is the bridging of everyday and disciplinary knowledge — rather than only their separation — that makes knowledge powerful in students' lives. The sociological differentiation between the two is essential, as it identifies disciplinary knowledge’s distinctive intellectual power. But moving from a sociological to an educational perspective, such as the capabilities approach to curriculum making (Lambert et al., 2015; Béneker et al., 2024), requires attending to how students encounter disciplinary knowledge and make it meaningful. A bridge requires two anchored ends: the disciplinary end is well theorised in the powerful knowledge literature; the everyday end — students' existing knowledge — requires empirical examination.

Geography education offers a particularly productive case. Hammond (2022) identifies three interconnected spaces of geographical thought — academic discipline, school subject, and everyday life — and the boundaries between them are permeable rather than fixed. Among these, the sub-field of children and young people's geographies is particularly relevant: as a strand of academic geography, it takes young people's everyday spatial experiences as its scholarly object (Aitken, 2018; Biddulph, 2012; Hammond, 2022). Its insights are important for informing school geography pedagogy, yet how it relates to the idea of powerful knowledge has not been examined. This study draws on young people's geographies to take students' everyday knowledge seriously, but does not stop at understanding or celebrating it. We examine how it relates to disciplinary geographical knowledge and how a teacher works with it to move students toward more powerful understanding.

Empirically, this study explores the bridge between everyday and disciplinary knowledge in a Finnish lower secondary school, with globalisation as the focal topic. Globalisation is boundary-crossing topic between academic geography, school geography, and everyday lives. This character makes it a productive case for investigating how everyday experience and disciplinary thinking connect. We ask two research questions: (1) What characterises young people's everyday knowledge of globalisation — including its themes and relationship to disciplinary geographical thinking? (2) How does the geography teacher interpret students' everyday knowledge and envision connecting it to disciplinary understanding in her teaching?