The Study of Textbooks

 

The study of textbooks

Carretero, Mario, Liliana Jacott, and Asunción López-Manjón. 2002. “Learning History through Textbooks: Are Mexican and Spanish Students Taught the Same Story?” Learning and Instruction 12 (6): 651–65.

The issue is how historical knowledge is understood and represented in the classroom.  These writers assume that there is some connection between how historical information is represented in classrooms and how it is portrayed in textbooks.  The picture of how history is represented in one society or another can be inferred from studying the classroom and, by extension, studying textbooks.  

We  are  assuming  that  the  study  of  history  textbooks  offers  a  broader  and  more illustrative picture of what happens in the classroom. Of course, we are aware that a comprehensive picture should include not only the study of instructional materials but also the study of what actually happens in the classroom. However, the analysis of historical content from both educational and cognitive points of view is an essential endeavour if we want to examine how students understand and represent historical knowledge. p. 652

The analytical approach is one where 1) the two versions are identified and 2) how are the two versions characterized as "official" or "unofficial." 653 The analysis takes into account the publication circumstances and the grades in which the texts were used. 

Faure, Romain. 2011. “Connections in the History of Textbook Revision, 1947–19521.” Education Inquiry 2 (1): 21–35.

Fuchs, Eckhardt, and Kathrin Henne. 2018. “History of Textbook Research.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Textbook Studies, edited by Eckhardt Fuchs and Annekatrin Bock, 25–56. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.

Hintz, Kathryn. 2014. “‘A Better Vision of What Social Studies Can Be’: How Elementary Teachers’ Philosophies Influence Their Use of Thehistory Alive!textbook.” Theory and Research in Social Education 42 (1): 96–126.

King, Lagarrett J., and Crystal Simmons. 2018. “Narratives of Black History in Textbooks.” The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119100812.ch4.

Perlmutter, D. D. 1997. “Manufacturing Visions of Society and History in Textbooks.” The Journal of Communication 47 (3): 68–81.

Torsti, Pilvi, and Others. 2003. “Divergent Stories, Convergent Attitudes: Study on the Presence of History, History Textbooks, and the Thinking of Youth in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina.” https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/21814/divergen.pdf.

Valls, Rafael. 2008. La Enseñanza de La Historia Y Los Textos Escolares/ The Teaching of History and Textbooks. Libros del Zorzal.

Wakefield, J. F. 1998. “[No Title].” ERIC. 1998. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED419246.

Zajda, Joseph. 2015. “Globalisation, Ideology and History School Textbooks: The Russian Federation.” In Nation-Building and History Education in a Global Culture, edited by Joseph Zajda, 29–50. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.