Textbooks matter. Their content, design, and educational aims and objectives have changed over time, as have the manner of their production, their role in the classroom, and the ways in which their users acquire the knowledge canonised in them. Today’s textbooks coexist or compete with other forms of educational media and are themselves undergoing a process of transformation in the wake of the digital revolution. These developments notwithstanding, research shows that textbooks remain the most important educational medium in schools worldwide, created in negotiation processes at the societal level and delivering the knowledge these societies deem relevant enough to pass on to the younger generation.
Yet, textbooks are more than simply mediators of knowledge. They always contain and enshrine underlying norms and values; they transmit constructions of identity; and they generate specific patterns of perceiving the world. All this means that textbooks are frequently contested, within and between societies, among political, social, religious, and ethnic groups.
It should come as no surprise, then, that textbooks have attracted the attention of researchers for more than a century; these research findings have often generated the impetus for textbook publishers and, importantly, curriculum developers and continue to do so today. One may be more startled to learn that textbook studies, though its subject is immediately evident, appears itself to be a chimera; the field is far from having clear boundaries and remits, and it has not established itself as a distinct discipline at institutions of higher education.
Nevertheless, this dynamic field is evolving rapidly. In the initial decades of its existence, researchers focused primarily on textbook content; over the last ten years, a process of diversification has been underway, directing the attention of the field principally towards the contexts in which textbooks are published. Alongside an examination of their embeddedness in their political, cultural, and societal surroundings, this entails research on processes of textbook production and reflection on their use in the classroom. Essentially, textbook studies has come of age, maturing into a field now approached from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives.
This spectrum of disciplinary loci means that most researchers whose work focuses on textbooks do not expressly consider themselves to be ‘textbook researchers’ but instead define themselves in line with their primary disciplinary orientation. This means that newcomers to the field and early-career scholars in particular often struggle with finding their voice and direction within this highly diverse field, a survey of which is a challenging undertaking. The field of textbook studies is crying out for a comprehensive introduction to its disparate landscape and a clear overview of its thematic emphases, theoretical approaches, and methodological procedures.
This Handbook attempts to respond to this need, although in so doing it is acutely aware of the challenge arising from the diversity characteristic of textbook studies. For this reason the conceptual focus revolves explicitly around textbook-related research questions informed by a cultural studies perspective. The Handbook therefore leaves cognitive research and research on teaching and learning to a future volume; instead, it centres on approaches from sociological and cultural studies, such as memory studies, sociology of knowledge, discourse theory, and media theory, alongside those drawn from the social and educational sciences, including socio-economic theory, neo-institutionalism, and curriculum studies. The methodological emphasis lies on contemporary procedures employed in the field of textbook studies, such as content analysis, visual analysis, discourse analysis, the comparative historical method, narrative interviews, participant observation, and ethnographic methodologies. In this way the Handbook maps the diverse and disparate theoretical and methodological approaches that have shaped textbook research.
Handbook Structure
Progressing beyond content analysis, the Handbook takes a fourfold approach to textbook studies, exploring history, theory, and methodology, contexts, content, and reception. The Handbook aims (1) to provide systematic access to the diverse field of textbook studies and its key trends, theoretical concepts, and methodological approaches; (2) to stimulate the evolution of new research areas, to offer new methodological avenues, and propose innovative ways of doing research in this field; (3) to enable researchers to contextualise their approaches within the field and to engage in theoretical and methodological discussion; and (4) to address a spectrum of stakeholders including, but not necessarily limited to, researchers, advanced students, teachers, and educational practitioners.
The Handbook is divided into four parts: History, Theory, and Methods of Textbook Research (Part I), Textbooks in Their Contexts (Part II), Textbooks and Their Contents (Part III), and Textbook Use, Effects, and Practices (Part IV). While Part I reflects on the historical, theoretical, and methodological dimensions of textbooks and thereby sets the framework for understanding textbook studies, Parts II through IV concentrate on textbooks and the manifold demands placed on them. This volume provides innovative ideas and inspiration for the field of textbook studies on three levels. Inspired by media studies, the Handbook differentiates between the context of media production, the contents or the product itself, and the reception and appropriation of media. This makes it possible to systematically map a research landscape in which it has thus far been difficult to gain an overview. The comparative analysis of research in the field, grouped into these three categories (production, product , reception), illuminates similarities and differences between individual theoretical and methodological approaches. The concluding chapter identifies gaps in the existing literature and elaborates new directions for future textbook studies. By collating outstanding research not only on textbook representations but also in the under-researched areas of textbook production and reception , it lays out potential directions for further theoretically sophisticated and empirically grounded research in this field.
Part I: History, Theory, and Methods of Textbook Research
The Handbook’s opening chapter, History of the School Textbook (Chap. 2), traces the historical development of textbooks from the early modern period to the present, reconstructing the canonisation of knowledge imparted in schools within a specific medium and relating this medium to other formats and media in which such knowledge has been provided.
The third chapter, History of Textbook Research (Chap. 3), provides an international view on research illuminating the role of education policy in the production of textbooks and the knowledge they contain. It explores key trends in textbook research, ranging from research on minorities , gender, and national identities to Europeanisation and transnational perspectives. It also sheds light on the development of research on the impact and reception of textbooks and on didactic textbook research and studies on the quality and use of textbooks, as well as on textbook production.
It has often been postulated that textbook research is under-theorised. Further, the field consistently finds itself on the receiving end of claims that its strong focus on content analysis marginalises methods such as expert interviews or classroom observation as approaches with the potential to fruitfully explore practices of textbook production, distribution, and use. The chapter on Theories and Methods of Textbook Studies (Chap. 4) provides a systematic overview of the considerable yet disconnected body of conceptual work around the construction of theories of ‘the textbook’. Highlighting both established and marginalised methods of textbook studies, it aims to provide new directions for future research.
Part II: Textbooks in Their Contexts
Textbooks are polyvalent objects of research that play specific roles in a range of societal contexts. They are subject to processes of negotiation in various arenas, processes that take place in line with the rules and logical frameworks dominant in these arenas. The chapters in this section therefore engage with research on the mechanisms by which specific functions and discursively constituted statuses are conferred on textbooks. They examine the ways in which textbooks, within their societal contexts, are frequently subject to processes such as the institutionalisation of school-based education, negotiations in the context of international relations, or political or ideological conflict. This part also looks at how textbooks have become objects of controversy in the public arena and/or the mass media or objects of economic endeavour or exploitation.
At the core of Part II are the societal conditions, stakeholders, and processes involved in the production of textbooks and the knowledge contained within them. It therefore discusses current research on authors and publishers directly engaged in textbook production and on the associated technological and media infrastructures and innovations. Further, it examines the role of curriculum development and decision-makers in this arena, institutional frameworks, and the range of societal contexts that influence textbook production in a broader sense. This section touches on a variety of theoretical approaches to research on textbook production, including organisation theories, neo-institutionalism, socio-economic approaches, discourse theory, and actor-network theory. In doing so, it explores the relevant stakeholders, networks, organisational structures and processes, forms of economic and market logic, state-controlled textbook systems, and public discursive arenas as reflected in and transmitted by mass media, in particular those around education policy.
Drawing on insights from subject-specific didactics to media linguistics, the chapter on Educational Publishers and Educational Publishing (Chap. 5) summarises research insights on textbook publishers across disciplines. The chapter takes a critical perspective on the issues, methodology, and theoretical approaches used in contemporary studies on textbook publishing , identifying future research trends.
The chapter on Textbook Authors, Authorship, and Author Function (Chap. 6) casts light on the specific situation of this group of textbook producers. It argues that being invisible to both the textbook reader and the researcher long influenced the authors’ work on textbooks. The chapter presents promising current research that identifies different ways in which contemporary textbook authors interact with other actors or networks and exercise their authorship.
The chapter on Textbooks and Education (Chap. 7) gives an overview of the shifting role of textbooks for educational research, showing how the attributions and functions of textbooks have changed over time. It traces the entanglement of textbook production with processes of institutionalisation. It provides examples of contemporary studies that theorise the production of textbooks and their role in institutional education.
The chapter on Educational Media, Reproduction and Technology: Towards a Critical Political Economy of Educational Media (Chap. 8) discusses contemporary research on textbook production within the context of textbook editing and publishing activities. It examines key aspects of the current discourse on cultural political economy, in particular the logic of (re)production, and addresses disruptive changes in the production of textbooks and educational media.
Textbooks are aids to processes of teaching and learning. They face the fundamental challenge of providing students with canons of age-appropriate knowledge and information in a manner that supplies them and their teachers with specific modes and forms of the communication of this knowledge and information. In the context of the methodical preparation, presentation, and communication of information that characterises ‘the textbook’, the function of educational media encompasses a number of different aspects: to inform, to reaffirm, to practice, to motiv...