Multiple Alterities

Views of Others in Textbooks of the Middle East

Elie Podeh, Samira Alayan, Elie Podeh, Samira Alayan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319622446
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book highlights and examines the role of the textbook in legitimising established political and social orders. Itanalyses the way in which the 'other' is presented in school textbooks, focusing on a number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and argues that the role oftextbooks in developing and maintaining a national identity should be afforded greater critical attention.Textbooks can help form national identities by developing a society's collective memory; this might involve a historical narrative which may be self-contradictory or even fabricated to a certain extent, including myths, symbols and collective memories that divide "us" from "them", and ultimately resulting a dichotomy between the Self and the Other.As well as addressing a range of theoretical questions relating to the study of textbooks generally, the volume also covers a broad spectrum of Middle Eastern states and societies, with contributions from Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Cyprus, Lebanon, Iraq, Kurdistan, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Israel and Palestine. It will be essential reading for researchers and students working in the fields of Education, Sociology and History, particularly those with an interest in national identities in the MENA region.

© The Author(s) 2018

Elie Podeh and Samira Alayan (eds.)Multiple AlteritiesPalgrave Studies in Educational Mediahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62244-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Views of Others in School Textbooks—A Theoretical Analysis

Samira Alayan¹ and Elie Podeh¹

(1)

School of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and David Yellin Academic College, Jerusalem, Israel

Samira Alayan

(Hebrew University of Jerusalem and David Yellin Teacher College, Jerusalem, Israel) received her doctorate in Education from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2006. She did her Post-doctoral in Germany and was a research fellow at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig, Germany, from 2006 to 2012 and since October 2012 has been lecturer and researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and teacher trainer at the David Yellin Teacher College, Jerusalem. Alayan was the co-editor of the book titled The Politics of Education Reform in the Middle East, self and other in textbooks and Curricula (Berghahn 2012), and she has publishes also many articles in academic journals, Alayan specialises in education in conflict societies and textbook reform in the Middle East.

Elie Podeh

(Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel) has published and edited 10 books and more than 60 articles in academic journals. His publications include The Portrayal of the Other in Israeli History Textbooks, 1948–2000 (Bergin & Garvey, 2002), The Politics of National Celebrations in the Arab World (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Chances for Peace: Missed Opportunities in the Arab-Israeli Conflict (University of Texas Press, 2015). Podeh is currently Professor of Islamic and Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and President of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Association of Israel (MEISAI).

End Abstract

The Role of Textbooks

It is generally agreed that school textbooks play a prominent role in children’s cultural upbringing. In their formative years, children’s minds are particularly elastic and vulnerable. School textbooks have the capacity to influence their value system and this change may well remain with them for the rest of their lives. This renders the school system and textbooks in particular key tools with which states can inculcate its citizens with a shared collective identity. Each generation transmits to the next its traditions, norms and values (Berghahn and Schissler 1987: 1–2; Pingel 1999: 7). No other instruments of socialisation can be compared to textbooks “in their capacity to convey a uniform, approved, even official version of what youth should believe” (Mehlinger 1985: 287). Textbooks are thus often implemented in order to promote a certain belief system and legitimise an established political and social order. In other words, the curriculum is never simply a neutral assemblage of knowledge incidentally appearing in the texts and classrooms. Rather, the selection and organisation of knowledge for schools is an ideological process that serves the interests of particular classes and social groups ( Apple 1993: 1–14, 44–63). In his analysis of the US education system, Michael Apple has concluded that what counts as legitimate and official knowledge “is the result of complex power relations and struggles among identifiable class, race, gender/sex, and religious groups” ( Apple and Smith 1991: 2–3). Both curricula and textbooks provide “battlegrounds” on which questions of power and cultural authority are contested (Lassig 2009: 4). The result is a reflection of the discourse of the hegemonic group in a society (Nasser 2005: 47). An analysis of school textbooks can therefore provide a window, or rather a mirror, through which the researcher can gain valuable insights as to the social and political parameters of a given society, its anxieties and trepidations as well as processes of nation-building , identity construction and social change (Schissler and Soysal 2005: 7).

It is difficult to establish the exact role played nowadays by textbooks as compared to other instruments of socialisation. With the growing exposure of the younger generation to electronic and social media , the centrality of the textbook as an educational medium has probably diminished. There is a lack of empirical knowledge on the impact of textbooks on children (Fuchs 2011: 17–18). Indeed, some researchers openly question the influence of textbooks on children’s minds. In Gregory Starrett’s opinion, textbooks “are never the only articulation of ideas and are hardly more influential than the ideals expressed by relatives, magazines and television shows, folklore, children’s games, schoolyard gossip, military training, or other influences to which children and young adults are exposed” (Starrett 2007: 229). Yet most scholars in the field of education tend to agree that textbooks still play an important role in the inculcating process (e.g., Jacobmeyer 1990: 8; Altbach 1987: 159),¹ particularly in developing countries, where textbooks have remained the single most consistent vehicle for academic achievement. Not surprisingly, the Education for All (EFA) Initiative, formed at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, in 2000, decided to focus on increasing the availability of textbooks in these countries in an attempt to facilitate quality education for all (Heyneman 1981: 556–557; Fiala 2006: 15–34). We can therefore assume that the role of textbooks in developing countries—and particularly those under authoritarian control and where the ministry of education promotes a unified official narrative—is all the more significant. Here, the textbook contents are not necessarily the product of ideological movements or interest groups—as is often the case in Western democratic states—but official policy statements (Starrett 2007: 229).

What renders the textbook such a powerful instrument? Evidently it carries a certain epistemological authority. Written texts, according to David Olson, “are devices which separate speech from speaker, and that separation in itself makes the words impersonal, objective and above criticism”. Further, he claims, textbooks resemble religious rituals since both “are devices for putting ideas and beliefs above criticism” (Olson 2010: 241; Nasser 2005: 46; Lassig 2009: 2). However, despite the authoritative nature of the text, we cannot assume that what is included in the textbook is actually taught, to say nothing of internalised. Audiences, according to Apple, “construct their own responses to texts. They do not passively receive texts, but actively read them based on their own class, race, gender and religious experiences” (Apple 1993: 61). In his opinion, students may accept the text at face value, challenge a certain claim or reject the whole narrative. In reality, however, it can be assumed that most students lack sufficient historical knowledge to contest the hegemonic official narrative. Generally speaking, students, especially in developing societies, would be unlikely to challenge the official narrative in a significant manner.

The role ascribed to the textbook of legitimising an established political and social order, as well as constructing a national identity, is particularly relevant to textbooks in the subjects of history, geography, social studies and civics. These books provide official and legitimate knowledge that inspires the students to get to “know” themselves as members of a collective. This sort of knowledge acquired from school textbooks, according to Nasser, “helps individuals delineate the symbolic and territorial boundaries of their identity and by that it contributes to the construction of the criteria by which inclusion and exclusion is made” (2005: 48). Textbooks thus play a significant role in the formation of national identities. Indeed, textbook research in recent years has accorded due recognition to this change (Fuchs 2011: 26, 2014: 63–79). Textbooks help construct a unified national identity by developing a society’s collective memory . Every group, according to Maurice Halbwachs, “develops a memory of its own past that highlights its unique identity vis-à-vis other groups. These reconstructed images provide the group with an account of its origin and development and thus allow it to recognise itself through time” (quoted in Zerubavel 1995: 4). The textual resources employed in the process of collective remembering therefore “bring with them a social position and perspective” (Wertsch 2002: 172). This collective memory includes a historical narrative which in many ways is inaccurate or even fabricated, including myths, symbols and other shared memories that provide “maps” and “moralities” casting a divide between “us” and “them”. As we shall see below, this dichotomy of the “Self” and the “Other”, be the latter a minority, different gender or external enemy, is particularly prevalent in history, geography and civics textbooks. In this respect, the school system and its educational media become yet another arm of the state, as agents of memory with the aim of ensuring the transmission of certain “approved knowledge” to the younger generation. Textbooks thus function as a sort of “ultimate supreme historical court” whose task it is to decipher “from all the accumulated ‘pieces of the past’ the ‘true’ collective memories which are appropriate for inclusion in the canonical national historical narrative” (Kimmerling 1995: 57). The problem is that ...