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understanding which continues to evolve – as it does with adults – through daily engagement in their environments. It forms the heart of their ethno-geographies. We contend not only that these are powerful aspects of children’s lives, but that their personal geographies provide powerful knowledge which children use in their daily lives to make sense of their world as they encounter it, to reflect on it and to deepen their appreciation, under-standing and the uses they canmake of it. Children do not enter schooling without a geographical background or without geographical skills, knowledge and understanding that are in and from their lived geographies. However, the notions that children use to understand and make use of their localities and their experiences in them, such as affordance, appropriation, subversion, exploration, social interaction, space and place knowledge, and environmental improvement, are largely not the terms that the academic discipline of geography uses to construct its discourse. The perspective that younger children develop powerful geographical knowledge accords with the argument within the sociology of childhood that we can and must take a more positive sense of childhood and of children’s experience and learning through their lived lives (Holloway and Valentine 2000; Jenks 2005), that children bring valid and valuable experience, understanding and knowledge into the classroom which should be engaged with and not treated as lacking or impaired and needing simply to be replaced or amended (Slater and Morgan 2000). A revised model of the knowledge–curriculum relationship We noted earlier that Freire set out two initial levels or stages in developing everyday or ethno-knowledges. ‘Moment one’ introduced the idea of knowledge in the experience, and ‘moment two’ was explained as a reflection on that experience to know it a second time, epistemologically and as common sense. We suggest that there could further be third and fourth levels or stages – a dialogue with the academic (a meta-reflection) that causes a third sense of knowing, but that in this dialogue the teacher also has a ‘re-knowing’ which develops/extends the sense of knowing the subject. The fourth stage is, then, the dialogue between the teacher knower and the subject community, in which the dialogue between the two in turn changes the subject/discipline – i.e. that teacher practitioners are part of the community that develops the subject as it relates to the school curriculum. In this model both academic and everyday knowledges are powerful. We contest Powerful Knowledge (capital letters), which privileges the academic, and suggest a view of knowledge that is powerful (lower case) in which both academic and everyday knowledges are viewed as equally powerful, albeit for different reasons. These knowledges then come into
DOI link for understanding which continues to evolve – as it does with adults – through daily engagement in their environments. It forms the heart of their ethno-geographies. We contend not only that these are powerful aspects of children’s lives, but that their personal geographies provide powerful knowledge which children use in their daily lives to make sense of their world as they encounter it, to reflect on it and to deepen their appreciation, under-standing and the uses they canmake of it. Children do not enter schooling without a geographical background or without geographical skills, knowledge and understanding that are in and from their lived geographies. However, the notions that children use to understand and make use of their localities and their experiences in them, such as affordance, appropriation, subversion, exploration, social interaction, space and place knowledge, and environmental improvement, are largely not the terms that the academic discipline of geography uses to construct its discourse. The perspective that younger children develop powerful geographical knowledge accords with the argument within the sociology of childhood that we can and must take a more positive sense of childhood and of children’s experience and learning through their lived lives (Holloway and Valentine 2000; Jenks 2005), that children bring valid and valuable experience, understanding and knowledge into the classroom which should be engaged with and not treated as lacking or impaired and needing simply to be replaced or amended (Slater and Morgan 2000). A revised model of the knowledge–curriculum relationship We noted earlier that Freire set out two initial levels or stages in developing everyday or ethno-knowledges. ‘Moment one’ introduced the idea of knowledge in the experience, and ‘moment two’ was explained as a reflection on that experience to know it a second time, epistemologically and as common sense. We suggest that there could further be third and fourth levels or stages – a dialogue with the academic (a meta-reflection) that causes a third sense of knowing, but that in this dialogue the teacher also has a ‘re-knowing’ which develops/extends the sense of knowing the subject. The fourth stage is, then, the dialogue between the teacher knower and the subject community, in which the dialogue between the two in turn changes the subject/discipline – i.e. that teacher practitioners are part of the community that develops the subject as it relates to the school curriculum. In this model both academic and everyday knowledges are powerful. We contest Powerful Knowledge (capital letters), which privileges the academic, and suggest a view of knowledge that is powerful (lower case) in which both academic and everyday knowledges are viewed as equally powerful, albeit for different reasons. These knowledges then come into
understanding which continues to evolve – as it does with adults – through daily engagement in their environments. It forms the heart of their ethno-geographies. We contend not only that these are powerful aspects of children’s lives, but that their personal geographies provide powerful knowledge which children use in their daily lives to make sense of their world as they encounter it, to reflect on it and to deepen their appreciation, under-standing and the uses they canmake of it. Children do not enter schooling without a geographical background or without geographical skills, knowledge and understanding that are in and from their lived geographies. However, the notions that children use to understand and make use of their localities and their experiences in them, such as affordance, appropriation, subversion, exploration, social interaction, space and place knowledge, and environmental improvement, are largely not the terms that the academic discipline of geography uses to construct its discourse. The perspective that younger children develop powerful geographical knowledge accords with the argument within the sociology of childhood that we can and must take a more positive sense of childhood and of children’s experience and learning through their lived lives (Holloway and Valentine 2000; Jenks 2005), that children bring valid and valuable experience, understanding and knowledge into the classroom which should be engaged with and not treated as lacking or impaired and needing simply to be replaced or amended (Slater and Morgan 2000). A revised model of the knowledge–curriculum relationship We noted earlier that Freire set out two initial levels or stages in developing everyday or ethno-knowledges. ‘Moment one’ introduced the idea of knowledge in the experience, and ‘moment two’ was explained as a reflection on that experience to know it a second time, epistemologically and as common sense. We suggest that there could further be third and fourth levels or stages – a dialogue with the academic (a meta-reflection) that causes a third sense of knowing, but that in this dialogue the teacher also has a ‘re-knowing’ which develops/extends the sense of knowing the subject. The fourth stage is, then, the dialogue between the teacher knower and the subject community, in which the dialogue between the two in turn changes the subject/discipline – i.e. that teacher practitioners are part of the community that develops the subject as it relates to the school curriculum. In this model both academic and everyday knowledges are powerful. We contest Powerful Knowledge (capital letters), which privileges the academic, and suggest a view of knowledge that is powerful (lower case) in which both academic and everyday knowledges are viewed as equally powerful, albeit for different reasons. These knowledges then come into
ABSTRACT