Reflections on the study of textbooks

Taylor and Francis Ltd HED100425.sgm 10.1080/ 046760042000277834 Hist ry of Education 0 00-0 (pri t)/00 -0000 (online) Original Article 2 4 & Francis Ltd 33 6November 2004 JohnIssitt Dept. of Edu t onal StudiesUniversity of YorkHeslington, YorkYO10 5DDUKjri2@york.ac.uk The noun ‘textbooks’ provokes many, mostly negative, responses. When I tell my students and colleagues that I study textbooks, tombstones often appear in their eyes expressing painful and buried memories of cramming for exams and repetitious wading through excruciatingly boring pages as directed by teachers who, they felt, could not be bothered to teach the material themselves. One fellow lecturer who was clearly less than sensitive to my sentiments even ventured ‘what on earth can be interesting in textbooks?’. It would be a mistake to underestimate the challenge of any attempt to elevate the current status of textbook research. The negativity surrounding textbooks in terms of use and status as both literary objects and vehicles for pedagogy is profound. There is a very deep-seated ‘anti-textbook ethos’ witnessed throughout the education business. This negative view of textbooks is partly informed by a certain professional defensiveness reflecting a contradictory, almost schizophrenic, sense of the function and cultural worth of textbooks. Whilst as teaching vehicles textbooks are scorned by many in the teaching profession as poor and insufficient and as assuming a basically passive learning style, studies show that they are extensively used—a fact easily confirmed by examination of school budgets as well as by cursory observations of school and university life. Any visitor to the classrooms of mainstream secondary schools in the UK will discover piles of textbooks in various dog-eared states arranged round the sides of rooms. As a teaching aid and as part of the learning experience, they are practically ubiquitous. So, on the one hand textbooks are derided, but on the other the reality of their universal use cannot be denied. A further influential driver serving to maintain the negativity surrounding textbooks comes from their low status as a literary genre. They are often scoffed at by academics who feel that they reflect no creative input and that the last thing leading-edge intellectuals engaged in research ought to be doing is formalizing yesterday’s knowledge for passive consumption by students. Such sentiment reflects a sense of literary elitism that simply ignores the fact that so much learning is done using textbooks. It also reflects the agendas and culture of the research community, driven as it is partly by the research assessment exercise and partly by disciplinary histories that cast discovery and breakthrough as having far more value than careful expository teaching. It is a salient reminder of human frailties, however, that such intellectual prudishness can be relatively easily overridden by the promise of royalties from successful textbook authorship.