The Schoolbooks Project

The Schoolbooks Project: Explorations into the history and material culture of schoolbooks

We still have a lot to learn from textbooks; from readers, guide books, workbooks, handbooks, manuals and all the books we read, ignored, loved, hated in school.  These are schoolbooks.  This prospectus outlines an academic partnership project that encourages and supports the scholarly exploration of the history and material culture of schoolbooks.  Schoolbooks represent a rich resource of history and culture.  

Vision:  A collaborative project is needed to encourage the scholarly analysis and reporting of explorations into the content and culture of schoolbooks as knowledge artifacts to inform current disciplinary practice. The Internet Archive, s. v. textbooks as of 2023 lists 92 collections of textbooks and a number of related archives pertaining to educational support materials for use by instructors and students.  These public archives are a rich source of historical and disciplinary information in a variety of media and formats of interest to scholars and student scholars in history, communication, and education, and wide variety of scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematics disciplines.  

The project will supply guidance and funding to for scholarly analysis and publication of reports, stories, and collections of projects focused on schoolbooks.  

Partners in the project in the academic disciplines of communication, composition, history, education, and library sciences will collaborate on the creation of guidance (training resources, sample pathways) and project archives. Partners will consist of librarians, scholars, teachers, and students.

The program will encourage the production of analytical work that can be uploaded to an Internet Archive project called "Schoolbooks".  The Schoolbooks archive will be open to works that have been solicited, supported, and guided by the Schoolbooks partnership members.  

The Schoolbooks project will be supported by communication tools (website, social media, archives) the give definition to the project and provide a record of projects carried out on schoolbooks, textbooks, and the material culture of schoolbooks.  

A starting point for the project is an exploration carried out by me into a revision of the 1956 edition of the University Interscholastic League Ready Writing Manual published in 1983.  This project analyzes the revision itself and explores connections between the revision and the intellectual currents of th 1970s found in the archives of its primary author, Dr. James Kinneavy, housed in the Dolph Briscoe Library at the University of Texas.  The project results will be housed in the Internet Archive.  This project is designed to serve as an exemplar or template for similar projects.