The concept of powerful knowledge and geographical education in the New Ukrainian School

Abstract

The article analyses new conceptual and methodological trends in teaching Geography in the countries with optimal models of teaching this school subject in order to take into account their experience in the context of the tasks of the New Ukrainian School reform. It clarifies the content and features of the concept of “powerful knowledge of geography”, which can modernize the content of school geography, raise its intellectual prestige and relevance. The knowledge is considered to be “powerful knowledge of geography” when it provides new ways of thinking about the world and is able to change the relationship of young people with the environment; gives students powerful ways to analyze, explain and understand; promotes the formation of critical and independent thinking, develops geographical considerations on how knowledge is created, tested and evaluated; enables young people to follow and participate in discussions on important local, national and global issues; contributes to the understanding of the factors of world diversity. It is necessary to take into account the progressive features of modern geography curricula used in England, Germany, Finland, Japan, Singapore, Australia when developing the geography programs for the New Ukrainian School. These curricula include: 1) general geographical (combination of physical and social geography) and interdisciplinary approach to the knowledge of geospatial phenomena, objects, processes at all stages of learning; 2) emphasis on the ways of human interaction with the environment and the results of this interaction (geography of cultural landscapes, geography for sustainable development); 3) focus in the same course on the territorial objects of different scales (from local to global) as a demonstration of geographical horizontal and vertical causal relationships; 4) geographical critical thinking as a result of learning; 5) mastering geographic information technologies as a resource for life and development; 6) observations and field research as an important component of subject competence. Keywords: didactics of geography, concept of powerful geographical knowledge, geography in the New Ukrainian School.