This article discusses the ideas of Dutch student teachers about what kind of geographical knowledge secondary students should learn. We take into account the backgrounds of student teachers by comparing three groups in different teacher-education programmes. Their ideas are analysed using Alaric Maude's types of powerful geographical knowledge in the context of a F3 curriculum (explained by Maude in this journal in 2016). We observe a clear dominance of Maude's type 2 knowledge and a lack of type 3 knowledge, which is more or less in line with the (national) curriculum. Maude's (2016) types of knowledge are useful as a framework, but they also raise further questions. We conclude with a reflection on the PDK in Dutch geography education in particular, and the implications for teacher education in general.

The small-scale research presented in this paper was conducted as part of the Geo-Capabilities project. Though originating in the Anglophone world, the project attempts to address the purposes and values of geography education internationally. Using the idea of "powerful disciplinary knowledge" the project asks what geography has to offer that helps young people develop the human capabilities they need in order to live a life that they consider valuable. In this paper we explore the challenges and opportunities presented by GeoCapabilities in several European national contexts. We asked selected teachers and teacher educators in four different countries (Finland, Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden) what role they thought geography plays in enhancing students' "human potential". Despite marked differences relating to the legal and structural background in each country we found major similarities in teachers' and teacher educators' curriculum thinking in relation to geography's contribution to the future well-being of their students.

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Tasks are essential in fostering students' learning processes, and thinking skills are considered to be of central importance to learning. In order to analyse how tasks promote the development of thinking skills in school geography, we need an instrument that looks beyond a simple distinction between lower and higher order thinking. It should be able to identify types of tasks based on distinctive elements on the way to acquiring powerful knowledge or knowledge of high epistemic quality. In this paper, we describe the development of an instrument based on the adaptation of existing categorisations and the use of Bernstein's recognition and realisation rules. The instrument distinguishes five levels of thinking: lower order thinking, use of thinking strategies, parts of higher order thinking, higher order thinking, and reflection. The instrument was employed to analyse tasks in geography textbooks used in the Netherlands and the German State North Rhine-Westphalia, with researchers and teacher educators in both states considering its efficacy both plausible and practicable. The results show that the instrument is sufficiently sensitive to identify differences in types of tasks and the extent to which access to powerful knowledge is fostered.

This article explores the usefulness of Maude's translation of Young's idea of powerful knowledge into geography education. Maude's classification of five types of powerful knowledge in geography education was used to analyse the written curriculum of the 'human and society' interdisciplinary domain in four schools in the Netherlands. The characterization appears to be useful in terms of painting a picture of what an integrated curriculum looks like from the perspective of powerful knowledge. The emphasis in the curricula is on learning geographical concepts that students might use to analyse phenomena (Type 2 knowledge). Remarkably little attention is paid to learning about places (Type 5), as a result of which the integrated curricula hardly contribute to a central aim of school geography, namely to build an extensive geographical world view.