Situating potentially and kinetically powerful knowledges: the power of meaning-making and social change

Abstract

ABSTRACT The notion of powerful knowledge has received much international attention and has significantly influenced curriculum development in many countries, including South Africa, from where this paper is written. The paper’s argument begins with philosophical positions and tensions raised by both proponents and critics of the notion of powerful knowledge in curriculum contexts. In response, it then describes a knowledge model that incorporates, first, the value of specialized and systematic powerful disciplinary knowledge (described in this paper as potentially powerful knowledge). Second, the model describes the notion of kinetically powerful knowledge (its situated nature of contextualization, appraisal and transformation). This model is then translated into a tool for assessing curriculum (acronymised as D-CAT). The tool is illustrated by using it to probe two extracts from the South African curriculum. The implications are that the knowledge model and curriculum assessment tool can be used by designers in the official and pedagogical recontextualising fields either analytically or to inform curriculum development. This is with a view to maximize the power of curriculum texts for enabling epistemological access and developing at once the powers of abstract, positioned and judgemental rationality, each of which has an important role to play in understanding and changing the world.