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How to use the sourcesPage 2 of 3
A special chapter within the field of school textbook analysis corresponds to the study of gender, social and ethnic issues. School textbooks haven constituted powerful instruments in the definition of social roles and in the construction of all kinds of stereotypes. Together with the analysis of content, these topics require the analysis of discourse and the examination of the different kinds of languages: textual and iconographic. A great precaution must be taken in order to decipher the so called hidden curriculum, to reveal non explicit intentions and values. If we bear in mind that this cultural material has been subjected to political and religious regulations and authorizations and censure, its study results of a great utility to reveal the mechanisms through which different authorities have tried to control the processes of cultural immersion and socialization of societies. In all studies related to the transmission of values, ideologies, and stereotypes through school textbooks, some precautions must be taken before interpreting the extent of the influence of certain languages and contents. Methodological rigour calls for a verification, through different indicators, of the use of the school textbooks which are being analysed. These indicators could be the number of published editions and the traces of its use, in school exercise books, for example. This last note brings up the importance of the possible mediation and influence placed by the teacher when using the textbook. School exercise books emerge as sources which can shed light into this matter: the influence and participation of the teacher in the employment of the textbook. Another field of research related to school textbooks is the History of School Disciplines. They play an important role in the configuration of the different disciplines and their respective codes. The school does not limit itself to the reproduction of the knowledge existent outside its boundaries. On the contrary, it adapts and transforms it elaborating knowledge and a culture of its own. The process by which knowledge generated outside the school is transformed into school disciplines has been called didactic transposition. The systematization and sequence of this written knowledge in a program and in a manual or school textbook, constitutes founding minutes of a discipline. Under this meaning, school disciplines can be conceived as a “transit” from the social spaces of a given field of knowledge to the “social space of the school”. This transit transforms such knowledge into a “school learning issue”, and this implies a change in the mental organization of the given knowledge in order to adapt it to the demands of the school timetable, to the conceptions on childhood, and to conventions and routines of teaching which sometimes impose such knowledge in the school curriculum. From all these characteristics sprouts the disciplinary code, a series of rules and guide lines which are widely imposed upon a certain discipline and are transmitted from one generation to another. This disciplinary code includes a body of contents organized according to a fixed methodology and extension following the pattern of themes, matters, topics, and didactic units or other forms of similar grouping. The disciplinary code implies a discourse on the educational value and utility of such contents, as well as the professional practices linked to its transmission within the school milieu. Similarly, school textbooks allow us to study the processes of disciplinary specialization which have occurred historically since the beginning of the fragmentation of encyclopaedic knowledge of the traditional school. Related to this, from the point of view of the school textbook as a collection of school disciplines, it also establishes the cannon which governs the accreditation of school knowledge and determines the content and the academic fields of the professionalization of teachers. |
