Powerful Knowledge in Curriculum Theory: Foundations, Characteristics And its implications for the curriculum and academic textbooks

Powerful knowledge is one of the recent concepts in curriculum theory that has affected the field of curriculum practice over the past decade and has been considered as a principle in the subject-based curriculum in order to return the knowledge to this field. The purpose of this article is to introduce and analyze the philosophical and scientific foundations, and the characteristics of the concept of powerful knowledge in curriculum, as well as to examine critical approaches to it from the perspective of curriculum specialists and investigating its implications for the curriculum and academic textbooks. Therefore, after introducing the background of the formation of this concept and the process of its development in the school of social realism, its philosophical and scientific foundations have been searched in the ideas of Durkheim, Vygotsky and Bernstein. In the following, the characteristics of this concept are mainly explained from the point of view of Michael Young and Johan Muller as the main commentators of this idea. After all, some critical theories and critiques related to the concept of powerful knowledge are presented and analyzed and at the end, the implications of this idea for the curriculum and academic textbooks are provided