ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the work of Young and Muller on powerful knowledge in the context of the substantive conceptualisation of the relation between knowledge and practice developed in earlier chapters in this book. In contrast to approaches to curriculum studies that are based on customary understandings of the ‘practice turn’ in the social sciences, it is argued that the notion of a ‘normative’ knowledgeable practice can help explicate the specialized activities that make powerful knowledge possible. The idea of normative practice provides a basis for the systematic revisability and specialised communities that are said to underpin powerful knowledge, while also illuminating how teachers recontextualise knowledge and reconciling the role of experience with other types of knowledge in a curriculum. Normative practice provides a basis for ‘knowledgeable’ purposeful practice which suggests that knowledge is never ‘for its own sake’, but always in pursuit of something ‘at stake’, although that which is at stake is always prospective. Furthermore, it is only through generating inclusive and participative forms of (normative) knowledgeable practice that communities can acquire the characteristics that enable knowledge to become meaningful and accessible to all in society without retreating into elitism and obsolescence. This chapter therefore provides a further illustration of the application of ideas of knowledgeable practice, following previous chapters on professional education and teaching.
