Powerful knowledge: insights from music’s case

Abstract

This paper examines Young and Muller’s elaboration of Michael Young’s concept of powerful knowledge and considers music’s alignment with the characteristics theorised as distinguishing this type of knowledge. Consideration of the concept in relation to music may be timely as music teachers continue to grapple with the problem of knowing what knowledge to include within the parameters of a school curriculum. The concept of powerful knowledge may provide us with a fresh way of considering what school music may have to offer in such a noisy and musically heterogeneous world. This curricular challenge however is by no means unique to music, even though it may be exacerbated in music which is so open to the forces of cultural change. I argue that access to this knowledge occurs by that placing abstract concepts at the centre of curriculum conception as the means to mediate the space between every day knowledge and the more vertical discourse of school knowledge. It is in this ‘academic’ space that students can come to understand and utilise music as form of powerful knowledge, when epistemic understanding illuminates the experiential and aesthetic dimensions of musical experiences.