Michael Young has written extensively about "powerful knowledge" as the type of knowledge that should be central in education: knowledge that is -- among many other things -- reliable and potentially testable, that helps us understand the natural and social world, and offers us a language to engage meaningfully in moral and political…

One of the ideas of the GeoCapabilities project(s) is to open up an international debate on the purposes and values of geography education. In line with this, the aim of this article is to examine some central perspectives used in GeoCapabilities, such as curriculum thinking, the teacher as 'curriculum maker' and the perspective of powerful…

This article examines whether geography can provide the powerful knowledge that is a key element of a Future 3 curriculum, and an important component of the GeoCapabilities Project's proposals for the teaching of geography. Powerful knowledge is knowledge that gives students the intellectual ability to analyse, explain, predict, evaluate and think…

How children piece together their ideas about other nations, peoples and cultures is an important but under-researched area of geography education. This article reviews findings conducted in Western industrialised countries relating to primary school children's global awareness and the factors which influence their understanding. Differences…

This study focuses on the pre-service teachers' reflection on an environmental knowledge questionnaire administered in an introductory environmental education course. Reflection sheets that addressed pre-/post-course knowledge questionnaires were collected from 75 students who took the course in three consecutive years. The students represented…

Within this decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), educational institutions need to increase their efforts to educate their students for a sustainable future. Teachers are most influential in educating children and teenagers to be leaders of tomorrow in protecting the environment. Thus, aspiring teachers should demonstrate…

This study is based on the hypothesis that the more a person knows about the environment the more positive the person's attitude will be toward the environment. But is this relationship real or assumed? This question is examined using data collected from students in their final year of secondary school (17-19 years) in Chile, England, Switzerland…

Geography is a traditional subject in Bulgarian education, both secondary and higher. Some of the most eminent Bulgarian scientists were geographers and theirs are many publications dealing not only with geography, but also with history, economics, ethnology, ethnography, political science, urban science and other disciplines. Major changes have…