Textbooks as Mediators in the Intellectual Project of History Education

How can a tool for analyzing history textbooks be developed from sociocultural theory? How can such a tool be applied to a sample of ten grade 11 South African history textbook chapters, which deal with the history of race and racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? This volume explores the theoretical development and practical application of a five-dimensional model for history textbook analysis. It draws on interdisciplinary concepts such as higher order mental functions, empathy, author positioning, narratives, and visual grammar for text design. Many of these concepts echo some of the underlying principles of the history curriculum. The analysis shows that despite a common curriculum, textbook chapters adopted very different approaches to the topic studied. Many of the textbook chapters positioned their envisaged textual community towards citizenship education rather than pursuing history as a process of discovery. The strong theoretical approach to history textbook analysis implies that the model could be adapted to other contexts, content areas, and educational media within or possibly even beyond the discipline of history.

Details

• Title: Textbooks as Mediators
• Subtitle: in the Intellectual Project of History Education
• Author: Dr. Katalin Eszter Morgan
• Edition: 1st edition
• Published: 1st edition 07/18/2013
• Subject: history, media studies
• Product Type: Book (Hardcover)
• Product type: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Binding: Softcover (paperback)
• Dimensions: 21.0 x 14.8 cm (DIN A5)
• Extent: V / 277 pages
• Condition: New (shrink-wrapped in foil)
• Keywords: Curriculum, empathy, historical thinking, history education, history textbooks, Holocaust, narratives, pseudoscience, racism, social Darwinism, sociocultural theory, stereotypes, text analysis

Author

Katalin Eszter Morgan (neé Fenyves) was born in Budapest, Hungary and grew up partly in Oberhausen, Germany. She moved to South Africa with her parents as a teenager in 1983. After completing an M.A. in Sociology she worked as a researcher for a non-governmental organization, and then later as a high school teacher for several years. She obtained a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Johannesburg in 2011. While completing the degree, she was also an editor for an academic journal, as well as a web designer and writing coach in the faculty of education. Since 2012 she is a lecturer in curriculum studies at the humanities faculty of the University of the Witwatersrand. She is the holder of the 2012 Georg Eckert Prize for "excellence in international educational media research".

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