Deng, Zongyi;
Chapman, Arthur;
Gericke, Niklas;
(2025)
Powerful knowledge, school subjects and the
curriculum: an international and comparative
perspective.
Journal of Curriculum Studies
10.1080/00220272.2025.2528744.
(In press).
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Abstract
This introductory essay presents a special issue that foregrounds school subjects as purpose-built educational enterprises and reconsiders the role of powerful knowledge in national curricula. Framed against the marginalization of knowledge in both global policy reforms and contemporary curriculum theory, it argues for renewed attention to the educational purpose, content, and construction of school subjects by engaging with questions such as: What are the purposes of school subjects? How should powerful knowledge be conceived in the curriculum? How are school subjects conceptualized and constructed? The issue includes four articles examining the purposes and content of school subjects—geography, history, religious education, and biology—in national curricula across Sweden, Finland, and England. It also features two articles exploring changes in business and management education in Poland and the ‘life and death’ of Liberal Studies as a school subject in Hong Kong. This special issue advances two key propositions: first, that school subjects are structured to fulfil multiple academic, civic, social, and personal aims; and second, that powerful knowledge should be understood not only in terms of its epistemic structure but also in relation to the intellectual and ethical capabilities it enables.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Powerful knowledge, school subjects and the curriculum: an international and comparative perspective |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/00220272.2025.2528744 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2025.2528744 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Keywords: | Powerful knowledge; school subjects; national curriculum; educational purposes; content |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10211455 |
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