Powerful knowledge and transformations processes across school subjects: interdisciplinary perspectives from the field of subject didactics

In this paper we outline an empirical research framework building on the concepts of powerful knowledge and transformation. Powerful knowledge as an idea was coined by Michael Young (2009) to re-establish the importance of knowledge in teaching and curriculum development. Powerful knowledge is defined by Young as a subject specific coherent conceptual disciplinary knowledge that when learnt will empower students to make decisions, and become action-competent in a way that influence their lives in a positive way. We develop the concept of powerful knowledge in two important ways. First, instead of only discussing powerful knowledge as an idea related to educational practices, we take a research position suggesting that powerful knowledge could be used as a tool in educational research related to subject specific education. In doing so we, in line with Deng (2015), propose to align the curricular concept of powerful knowledge to the European research tradition of didactics in general, and subject didactics in particular. Second, we develop the concept of powerful knowledge by refuting the dichotomization suggested by Young (2015) that curriculum (‘what to teach’) can be separated from pedagogy (‘how to teach’). Instead we view these two questions as interrelated in didactical research. We suggest an expansion of the concept of powerful knowledge by using the analytical concept of transformation as a key concept in describing powerful knowledge in different disciplines, institutions and school subjects. The reason for this is that the concept of transformation is a central issue for didactical research from different European research traditions. Transformation as we understand it can be described as an integrative process in which the content knowledge is transformed into knowledge that is taught and learned through various transformation processes outside and within the educational system in relation to individual, institutional and societal level. Such processes of