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Geography and powerful knowledge: a contribution to the debate

Alaric Maude

The concept of powerful knowledge was introduced into educational debates nearly a
decade ago by Michael Young, a British sociologist of education (Young 2008). He argued
that the main purpose of schools is to teach knowledge that enables students to understand
and think beyond the limits of their own experience, and describes such knowledge as
‘powerful’. The Editorial section of a recent issue of IRGEE has a comment by two revered
geography educators, Frances Slater and Norman Graves (Slater and Graves 2016), on the
application of Young’s concept of powerful knowledge to geography. Their comments were
in response to an interview with David Lambert that was published by the Editors of IRGEE
in an earlier issue (Stoltman, Lidstone and Kidman 2015). Slater and Graves raise some
important questions, and in this paper I attempt to answer some of them, and to contribute
to what the Editors of IRGEE consider ‘may be the most significant debate to emerge within
the geographical education community for many years.’

What is powerful knowledge?

My first comment is about the meaning of powerful knowledge. Slater and Graves (2016,
pp. 198-190) write that:

We can also readily accept David Lambert’s general delineation of powerful knowledge
as:
(1) evidence based,
(2) abstract and theoretical,
(3) part of a system of thought,
(4) dynamic, evolving, changing - but reliable,
(5) testable and open to challenge,
(6) sometimes counter-intuitive,
(7) exists outside the direct experience of the teacher and the learner and
(8) discipline-based (though this poses the problem of defining a discipline).

This describes one element of Michael Young’s conceptualisation of powerful knowledge —

one that focuses on the characteristics of the knowledge and how it is produced — as
expressed in this statement:

For me powerful knowledge means, knowledge that is reliable, fallible and potentially
testable … (Young 2011, p. 182).

The knowledge identified by these criteria can be described as strong or robust, because of
the way it has been produced within disciplines, but is it necessarily powerful? The word
‘power’ implies an ability or capacity to do something that has an effect or outcome, so
another set of criteria may be needed to help teachers select those elements of discipline
knowledge that give their students learning outcomes that might be considered powerful.
These criteria can be found in some of Michael Young’s other descriptions of powerful
knowledge.
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Powerful knowledge refers to what the knowledge can do or what intellectual power it
gives to those who have access to it. Powerful knowledge provides more reliable
explanations and new ways of thinking about the world and acquiring it and can provide
learners with a language for engaging in political, moral, and other kinds of debates.
(Young 2008, p. 14)

Powerful knowledge’ is powerful because it provides the best understanding of the

natural and social worlds that we have and helps us go beyond our individual experiences
… (Young 2013, p. 196)

Knowledge is ‘powerful’ if it predicts, if it explains, if it enables you to envisage

alternatives. (Young 2014a, p. 74)

Knowledge in the sense we are using the word in this book allows those with access to it
to question it and the authority on which it is based and gain the sense of freedom and
excitement that it can offer (Young 2014b, p. 20).

These statements focus more on what powerful knowledge can achieve for those who have
it, and less on the inherent characteristics of this knowledge. They identify knowledge as
powerful if it enables young people to:

• discover new ways of thinking

• better explain and understand the natural and social worlds
• think about alternative futures and what they could do to influence them
• have some power over their own knowledge
• be able to engage in current debates of significance, and
• go beyond the limits of their personal experience.

The next section discusses how these types of knowledge could be made geographical.

What is powerful geographical knowledge?

Slater and Graves write:

Whilst one can readily accept Lambert’s model of curriculum making in geography …,
there seems to be a reluctance to specify what the “powerful knowledge in geography”
actually is.

This is an important issue. Can the generic concept of powerful knowledge, as articulated by
Michael Young, be used to identify specifically geographical forms of powerful knowledge?
In the interview with David Lambert that sparked the response by Salter and Graves, he
does not identify geographical knowledge that is powerful, other than that it involves ways
of thinking about the world. However, Lambert does have some discussion of what forms of
geographical knowledge might be identified as powerful in two of his papers. The first lists
some specific examples of powerful geographical knowledge in an appendix, although
without any explanation of why they are powerful (Lambert 2011). The other proposes
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three types of powerful geographical knowledge, but these are derived via a capabilities
approach to the curriculum and not directly from the concept of powerful knowledge itself
(Lambert 2014a). Neither adequately answer the question raised by Slater and Graves.

In two recent papers I have used Young’s concept to identify specifically geographical types
of powerful knowledge. These types are based on the second interpretation of the concept,
as described above. Here I present a brief summary of my argument; for a more extended
discussion and examples see Maude (2015 and 2016).

I suggest that there are at least five types of geographical knowledge that can be powerful.

1. Knowledge that provides students with ‘new ways of thinking about the world.’

Ways of thinking can be powerful because they may change students’ perceptions, values
and understandings, the questions they ask and the explanations they explore. They may
even change their behaviour. Geography’s ways of thinking are embedded in its major
concepts, such as place, space and environment. i Each of these concepts contain more than
one way of thinking. The concept of space, for example, teaches students to:

• recognise the influence of location, distance and proximity on human life

• understand that spatial distributions have environmental, social, economic and
political consequences
• recognise that space can segregate people, particularly through the operation of the
housing market or the location choices of minority groups, and perpetuate inequality
• appreciate that space is perceived, structured, organised and managed by people,
and can be designed and redesigned to achieve particular purposes.

Place is also a rich geographical concept, one dimension of which can be summed up in the
following statement:

Each place is unique in its characteristics. Consequently, the outcomes of similar

environmental and socioeconomic processes may vary between places, and similar
problems may require different strategies in different places.

This statement says that because places vary in their environmental and human
characteristics, the outcomes of similar processes may differ because of their interaction
with these varying characteristics. It also says that strategies to address similar problems
need to take account of the distinctive characteristics of each place, which could be its
environment, culture, economy, leadership or past experience. This is the core of
geography’s contention that ‘place matters’, and that context is important.ii This is a
fundamental part of thinking geographically, and is identified by David Lambert (2014b, p.
178) as part of geography’s powerful knowledge. It is powerful because it may produce
better explanations and more effective strategies.

2. Knowledge that provides students with powerful ways of analysing, explaining and
understanding.
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Michael Young argues that knowledge is powerful when it enables students to understand
and explain phenomena or events, particularly those that are beyond their personal
experience. There are at least three forms of geographical knowledge that can have this
power. These are concepts that have analytical power, concepts that have explanatory
power, and geographical generalisations.

a) Analytical methods
Methods that can be used to identify and test relationships between phenomena are
powerful because they contribute to understanding and explanation. Some of geography’s
analytical methods are shared with other subjects, but some are distinctively geographical
because they are derived from the subject’s concepts. For example, the method of testing
relationships by analysing them at different spatial scales comes from the concept of scale,
and is important because different explanatory factors can be involved at different scales.
For example, climate is the main determinant of the type of vegetation at the global scale
but soil and drainage may be the main factors at the local scale.

Another geographical way of exploring the relationships between variables is the method of
comparing places. While geographers generally cannot conduct experiments to test for
relationships, they can conduct controlled comparisons of places in which one characteristic
is more-or-less constant in all of them, to see whether any other characteristics of these
places are also similar because of a causal relationship with the one that is constant.

b) Explanatory concepts

Relative location is an example of a concept that has explanatory power. Location can be
absolute (the unique location of a place as described by latitude and longitude) or relative
(the location of a place in relation to other places, as described by distance from them), but
relative location is generally more significant than absolute. For example, relative location
matters more than absolute location for businesses because of the advantages of closeness
to suppliers, markets and information, and for individuals because of access to educational
and employment opportunities. Isolated locations distant from major centres are likely to
provide fewer opportunities for both businesses and individuals than locations in or close to
large cities. Similarly, the climate of a place is influenced by its position relative to land and
water masses as well as by its latitude. Internationally, it can be important to understand
where countries are located relative to each other, as neighbours don’t always make friends
and can have disputes over borders, rivers and minerals.

Interconnection is another concept with explanatory power. For example, to explain what a
place is like, and especially why it is changing, students should investigate its
interconnections with other places. These interconnections include environmental
processes, the movement of people, flows of trade and investment, the purchase of goods
and services, cultural influences, the exchange of ideas and information, political power,
international agreements and other relationships. They may be between places at the same
level of scale, such as the flows of water within a river catchment or of trade between two
cities, or between places at different levels of scale, as in the influence of national
government policies on manufacturing places. The significance of these interconnections is
that they change the places that are connected, and so have explanatory power.
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c) Geographical generalisations
Generalisations are ‘a synthesis of factual information that states a relationship between
two or more concepts’ (Mckinney and Edgington 1997, p. 2). Generalisation is not a
specifically geographical method, but it can be used to make generalisations about the
phenomena studied in geography. These can be powerful because they ‘they allow students
to apply what they have learned to new settings and to transfer prior knowledge to new
situations’ (Shiveley and Misco 2009). This enables them to ask appropriate questions and
make sense of contexts beyond their experience. Geographical generalisations can be
especially powerful if they include explanation or can be used to predict.

An example of a generalisation that has both explanatory and predictive power is:

Coastal areas are dominated by wave and tidal processes that drive weathering and
sediment movement, and stopping natural sediment movements in one location on the
coast may cause additional erosion and major coastal problems elsewhere (adapted from
Holden, 2011, p. 119).

This statement warns of the potentially negative effects of structures like marinas, and the
importance of locating them in places where sediment movement is minimal. This is advice
often ignored by developers and planning authorities.

3. Knowledge that gives students some power over their own geographical knowledge.

The idea for this type of powerful knowledge came from thinking about this statement by
Michael Young:

Knowledge in the sense we are using the word in this book allows those with access to it
to question it and the authority on which it is based and gain the sense of freedom and
excitement that it can offer. (Young 2014b, p. 20)

I interpret the statement to mean that one type of powerful knowledge is knowledge that
teaches students how to evaluate claims about knowledge, because this gives them the
ability to be independent thinkers able to be critical of the opinions of others, including
those of people in positions of power. To do this students need to know something about
the ways knowledge is created, tested and evaluated within geography, and about
geographical reasoning. This appears to be a neglected area in the literature on
geographical education.

4. Knowledge that enables young people to follow and participate in debates on significant
local, national and global issues.

Michael Young contends that the ability to follow and participate in public debates is
essential to full and equal participation in society and its conversations about itself, and
without this ability young people lack power. There are many issues where geographical
thinking and the subject’s ability to integrate knowledge from the natural and social
sciences can help to analyse and evaluate contending opinions, such as water scarcity; the
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management of cities; natural hazards; land degradation; environmental sustainability;

social inequalities at local, national and global scales; rural and regional development;
immigration; globalisation and the implications of the Anthropocene.

5. Knowledge of the world

If powerful knowledge is knowledge that takes students beyond the limits of their own
experience, then the geography that teaches students about places that are beyond their
experience must be regarded as powerful. This is knowledge about the world’s diversity of
environments, peoples, cultures and economies, which may stimulate children’s curiosity,
wonder and awe. It is also knowledge of their links with other places and the
interconnectedness of the world, which may develop a sense of global citizenship.

The next section of this paper briefly discusses how these types of geographical knowledge
can guide teachers in selecting what and how to teach, while the final section provides an
example of how they could be integrated into the teaching of a typical geography topic.

How does the concept of powerful knowledge help teachers decide what and how to
teach?

Slater and Graves (2016) take issue with this comment by David Lambert in his interview:

Future 3 and “powerful knowledge” on which it depends, does not tell us what to teach,
but provides a way of thinking about the curriculum.

Their response is:

This seems to be self-contradictory. If powerful knowledge does not indicate to the

teacher what to teach, what does it do? Introducing children to “ways of thinking about
the world” presumably involves getting them to learn to apply concepts, principles and
skills that are part of geography’s knowledge.

I agree with the second half of this quotation, but with a reservation explained below. If
Michael Young’s argument that all students should have the opportunity to learn powerful
forms of knowledge is accepted, then young people should be taught intellectually powerful
ways of geographical thinking, analysing, explaining, finding out and knowing. These ways
include the ‘concepts, principles and skills that are part of geography’s knowledge’, to quote
from Slater and Graves. In particular it is essential that students learn about geography’s key
concepts and how they can be used, because they can be powerful, and students are
unlikely to learn about them in any other school subject. However, apart from space, place
and environment, there is no definitive set of geographical concepts, and some of the
additional ones proposed in the literature are also important to other disciplines. Similarly,
there is no definitive set of principles (which I think of as generalisations) and skills that
should be taught, and some of geography’s traditional skills have been rendered obsolete by
technological change. There is also no definitive list of the substantive knowledge that
should be taught. Geography’s ways of thinking can be applied to the study of a very wide
range of natural and social phenomena, although some topics lend themselves better to
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geographical analysis than others.

What the concept of powerful knowledge does tell teachers is that whatever substantive
content they select or are required to select should be taught in ways that enable students
to learn powerful geographical ways of thinking, analysing and understanding. The concept
also encourages teachers to engage students with current debates on local, national and
global issues, and to apply geographical thinking to them, and this will require them to learn
about the basic physical and human processes needed to have informed opinions on often
complex problems. Finally, it provides support for geography’s longstanding role in teaching
about the countries and places of the world. This is sometimes seen by geography teachers
in schools and universities as old-fashioned regional geography and devoid of intellectual
merit, but if taught well it takes young people well beyond the limits of their own
experience, which is one aspect of powerful knowledge, and exposes them to other
environments, other peoples and other cultures.

An example of how powerful knowledge can be employed in teaching a geography topic

To illustrate how powerful geographical knowledge could be integrated into teaching I will
describe a way of conceptualising a Year 8 unit in the Australian geography curriculum. The
unit is called Changing Nations, and is one of two units in Year 8 geography. The words that
describe what teachers must teach are in five Content Descriptions. These are:

• Causes and consequences of urbanisation, drawing on a study from Indonesia, or

another country of the Asia region
• Differences in urban concentration and urban settlement patterns between Australia
and the United States of America, and their causes and consequences
• Reasons for, and effects of, internal migration in both Australia and China
• Reasons for, and effects of, international migration in Australia
• Management and planning of Australia’s urban future (ACARA 2016)

These could be taught as a sequence of unconnected and largely factual topics, but the
clues to their conceptual coherence are provided in the Year 8 Level Description:

‘Changing nations’ investigates the changing human geography of countries, as revealed

by shifts in population distribution. The spatial distribution of population is a sensitive
indicator of economic and social change, and has significant environmental, economic
and social effects, both negative and positive. The unit explores the process of
urbanisation and draws on a study of a country of the Asia region to show how
urbanisation changes the economies and societies of low- and middle-income countries.
It investigates the reasons for the high level of urban concentration in Australia, one of
the distinctive features of Australia’s human geography, and compares Australia with the
United States of America. The redistribution of population resulting from internal
migration is examined through case studies of Australia and China, and is contrasted with
the way international migration reinforces urban concentration in Australia. The unit
then examines issues related to the management and future of Australia’s urban areas
(ACARA 2016).
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The beginning of the Level Description tells us that the unit is about the changing human
geography of countries, and that it uses shifts in population distribution as the measure of
change. So the way of thinking underlying the whole of the unit is spatial, and an application
of powerful geographical knowledge of the first type. The description also says that
population distribution is chosen as the measure of change because it is a sensitive indicator
of economic and social change. This is using a spatial distribution analytically, an example of
powerful geographical knowledge of the second type. The two most significant changes in
the spatial distribution of population within nations are urbanisation in developing countries
and regional shifts in developed countries. So to explain shifts in population distribution we
have to examine the main forms of migration.

in their investigation of urbanisation through case studies of Indonesia and China, students
could evaluate the explanatory power of a generalisation (another example of type 2
powerful geographical knowledge) like this:

Because of the advantages of geographical concentration, economic activities tend to

cluster in space unless tied to the location of natural resources or dispersed customers.

The relevance of this statement is that in an urbanising economy a growing proportion of

jobs are in economic activities, like manufacturing or trade, that are not tied to the location
of natural resources, and these tend to cluster in towns and cities because of the
advantages of spatial concentration and proximity. Students should also learn that
urbanisation is both a response to and a cause of profound changes in the economy and
society of a nation, and that by studying the causes and consequences of urbanisation they
can learn a lot more about a country.

The next case study is of Australia. Australia is no longer urbanising, so this part of the unit is
about different types of internal migration, which can reveal much about current economic
and social change within the nation. The case study of Australia also includes international
migration, which is unimportant in Indonesia and China. As this is mainly to the major cities
it counters the net loss of the population from some cities through internal migration, and
so reinforces urban concentration. Where migrants settle in the cities is a spatial question,
but the concentration of some groups in specific areas is also a current social and political
issue. Space matters!

The next step in teaching uses the comparison of Australia and the United States to examine
whether urbanisation produces the same spatial distribution of population in countries
where the process is finished. This is about a similar process producing different outcomes
in different places. Place matters! Two simple measures can be used to identify differences
between countries in urban concentration and urban settlement patterns, as shown in Table
1. What the first measure shows is that Australia is more urbanised than the United States,
and this high level of urbanisation has been a feature of the nation for well over a century.
The second measure shows that Australia also has a much higher level of urban
concentration, with 59 per cent of the population living in cities with populations of more
than 1 million. In Australia, there are just five of these cities, and the country lacks the
middle-sized cities found in most other developed nations.
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Table 1: Comparison of urbanisation and urban concentration in Australia and the USA,
2014

Measure Australia USA

Percentage of total population in urban areas 89 81
Percentage of total population in urban 59 45
agglomerations of more than 1 million

Suggestions on how to explain the second of these differences between Australia and the
United States are contained in this elaboration in the curriculum:

• researching the causes of urban concentration in Australia and the United States of
America, for example, the history of European settlement, migration, the export
orientation of the economy, the centralisation of state governments, environmental
constraints and the shape of transportation networks (ACARA 2016).

The point here is that, although Australia and the United States are both highly urbanised
countries, there are sufficient historical, environmental, economic, social and political
differences between them to produce significantly different urban patterns. To explore
these differences students could use the method of place comparison (type 2 powerful
geographical knowledge) outlined earlier. They might, for example, analyse the influence of
the environment on urban patterns by comparing climatically similar regions in the two
countries. They could also be introduced to counter-factual thinking. For example, they
could speculate on what the urban pattern of Australia might have been if there had been
the same number of states established along the east coast as in the United States.
Similarly, they could consider what Australia might have been like if state governmental
functions and public facilities like universities had not all been located in the same city,
unlike their location in many of the states in the United States, where the capital and the
state university were frequently not located in the main commercial centre, but allocated to
separate towns.

The final step in the teaching of the unit is about the last of the content descriptions in the
curriculum, on the management and planning of Australia’s urban future. This provides the
opportunity to examine the environmental, economic, social and political consequences of
the spatial distribution of the Australian population, and particularly of the high level of
urban concentration. As these are a matters of regular public debate students will gain
experience of the fourth type of powerful geographical knowledge.

The approach to the unit on Changing Nations suggested here provides opportunities for
students to:

• illustrate the application of ways of thinking associated with the concepts of space
and place (type 1 powerful geographical knowledge);
• use concepts analytically (type 2 powerful geographical knowledge);
• use generalisations to explain (type 2 powerful geographical knowledge);
• engage in debate on a national issue (type 4 powerful geographical knowledge); and
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• learn more about Indonesia, China, Australia and the USA (type 5 powerful
geographical knowledge).

They should also learn something about geographical ways of reasoning (type 3 powerful
geographical knowledge) as they work their way through the unit.

What makes this way of teaching a unit geographical is the way it uses the concepts of space
and spatial change to explore and analyse important social and economic changes within
nations. However, the causes of these spatial changes, and most of the consequences, are
not geographical but economic, social, environmental, psychological and political. At the risk
of being convicted of heresy, I doubt that there are any strictly geographical causes except
perhaps absolute location. The influence of relative location, for example, depends on the
infrastructure and technologies that link places, the way these are managed by businesses
and governments, and on people’s knowledge of and relationships with other places.
Similarly, geographical distance affects migration decisions through the psychological and
economic costs and benefits of moving, not just through distance. What is geographical
about migration are some of its consequences, particularly the ways it changes the spatial
distribution of population, and the places that migrants leave and move to. However, these
changes to places are again environmental, demographic, economic, social and political.
This wide-ranging use of explanations from a variety of disciplines is one of the strengths of
geography, because it develops a comprehensive analysis of causes and consequences, and
not one limited to the perspective of a single subject.

Conclusion

This paper is a contribution to the growing debate on powerful knowledge in geography,

stimulated by Slater and Graves’s comments on this subject in a recent issue of IRGEE. It is
not a criticism of their views, but an attempt to address some of the important questions
they raise. First, I have suggested an alternative way of describing and identifying powerful
knowledge than the one in their commentary, a way that defines powerful knowledge by
the intellectual power it gives to those who have it, rather than according to the way it is
produced. Second, I have used this way of viewing powerful knowledge to identify five types
of knowledge that may be considered both powerful and geographical. They are powerful
according to my interpretation of Michael Young’s concept, and they are geographical
because they apply geography’s concepts to think about, question, analyse, explain and
interpret the world. Third, through a brief discussion and a more extended example, I have
tried to show how teachers could use powerful geographical knowledge to help them
decide what and how to teach, and to find ways to illustrate and apply geographical ways of
thinking. This will help to produce learning that is distinctively geographical. It might also
help to explain the value of geography to those non-geographers who make decisions about
our subject, and that could also be powerful.

References

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curriculum, 7-10 geography. This material was downloaded from the Australian Curriculum
website (www.australiancurriculum.edu.au), accessed 2.7.2016, and was modified. The
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i
Johnston and Sidaway (2015, p. 58), writing about human geography, state that it ‘is arguably defined less by
particular texts or terminology and more by canonical concepts — place, space, and environment, plus the
interactions among the three, at a variety of scales’. Young also emphasises the importance of concepts when
he writes that ‘… intellectual development is a concept-based not a content-based or skill-based process’
(Young 2010, p. 25).
ii
For an example from physical geography, see Phillips (2001).