A Deafening Silence: History Textbooks and the Students Who Read Them

This article provides a review and analysis of research targeting the rift separating history written for adults and the historical texts aimed at K-12 audiences––specifically history textbooks. The role of personal agency in historical writing, both for those who write and those who read, is emphasized as an important element separating the two rhetorical genres. A body of research exploring what students learn from reading and the complex process of reasoning that goes along with interpreting their history textbooks is reviewed. In particular, it focuses on how students learn from texts and on recent trends in the study of teaching and learning history that underscore the role of authorship in historical texts. The author discusses the relative silence of authorial voices within the discourse of history textbooks, arguing that this anonymous, authoritative style of writing may be an important contributing factor to the impoverished conception of history noted in the literature of school history reform.

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