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| What textbooks can feel like. Source: http://xkcd.com/971/ .
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To me, textbooks are useful tools for teachers to use and draw from, but not to just hand out to students and assign large portions for reading. There are passages from textbooks (as well as passages from other texts) that can be very useful, and I think D & Z are a bit too harsh on them. However, I think that we need to be extremely critical of textbook authority. This Newsweek article has some good points about some really bad textbooks. http://www.newsweek.com/2014/10/03/textbook-case-bad-textbooking-texas-272351.html
I think it's too easy to just say that textbooks are all bad or mostly bad. For the most part, I think they are generally pretty inefficient, outdated, and occasionally just wrong. But I think it's more useful to look towards what we could be doing with textbooks. Textbooks are, in their purest form, just an organization of a broad range of materials on a few topics that some people decided were important for students to know. This is exactly like what a curriculum is! The problem is that the agenda of a textbook and the agenda of a classroom don't always match up. So we need to be careful not to rely on textbooks, and we have to always be aware that they can be wrong. But they also have a broad range of materials, and this can be beneficial for teachers to increase the repertoire of materials that they are comfortable with and can draw from.
The other major problem I have with textbooks, though, is the fact that they present a version of history, and this version tends to ignore certain people or viewpoints. We have to always remember that textbook does not equal pure and equal truth, and that they tend to revise history in a way that propels only certain viewpoints. I think that educators in History and Social Studies are generally pretty aware of this, but English teachers are not necessarily as aware of this. The texts that editors of textbooks choose to put forth, as well as the commentary they choose to use for these texts, is a version of history, and it may very well be one that is racist, or denies the history of another people.
We need to be cautious with textbooks, but they can be valuable resources.
Hey there Nathan!
ReplyDeleteI see that we agree a lot on the same issues--that textbooks need to be treated with caution, lest they start teaching for the class instead of the teacher. You say that it's easy to be too hard on textbooks, but aside from being a huge encyclopedia of information, do you think you could name some of the more positive aspects of a textbook? I don't mean to challenge you or anything, I'm just curious to see what you think--I'm very wary about textbooks and I would try to distance myself from them in my classroom, but I'd like to see what you have to say further! Textbooks can't be all bad, right?
Sure thing. I think textbooks are useful not only as a broad basis of information, but despite what I said in the post, they are also useful in what they decide to put in. If I am looking at a textbook on British Literature, that's an enormous scope of literature to look at. So why are certain texts focused on, and other ones are left out? What is important about the study of British Literature that requires certain texts to be in the majority of them (say, Beowulf and Shakespeare)? I think as teachers (and also as students!) it can be really interesting and intriguing to analyze textbooks for their content, and why authors chose to put certain texts or authors in while leaving some out. I think the more we understand them as just another tool that we can use, and less as a truly authoritative source, the more we can examine why it is we even trust them in the first place.
DeleteSo in a roundabout way, I guess I'm saying that I think textbooks are useful simply because they HAVE to cover a broad scope, and it can be useful to examine their choices in literature. Or, if you happen to be a History teacher (ahem), which leaders and events the textbook editors have decided are important
Also I meant to add another paragraph but I forgot. There are also (occasionally) some good thinking points in textbooks! Those questions at the end of chapters are generally pretty annoying and work on basic levels of Bloom's taxonomy, but a few of them are pretty useful! So there's that.
DeleteHi Nathan -
ReplyDeleteI disagree that D&Z are too harsh on textbooks - I actually think they feel similarly about them as you seem to - yes, they are critical of them and clearly outline some of the issues with overusing them - but I think they also have respect for textbooks (the better ones at least) as valuable resources that can enrich learning if used strategically and if supplemented by other texts.
I am curious about why you chose the cartoon you've shared - what do you think it is saying about textbooks (or books in general)? To me it seems to call for a balanced approach similar to what D&Z propose - we do need words (that guy isn't going to learn uch staring at blank pages all day), but we also need to be critical of them.
I'm not an English major, so I won't take it too personally what you said about English teachers ;) but I am very curious why you feel that way... I had some wonderful English teachers that taught me to be critical of text and to consider multiple points of view when engaging with text - some much more so than some of my History teachers.
I chose the cartoon mostly for the last panel; sadly, it's the one that gets cut through with weird text from the side panel. I'll have to try and figure out how to make that not happen. It's the idea that someone is trying to avoid the big industry of textbooks because it's evil, and is in the process buying into a different industry that's screwing him just as much. His ideas are right, of course: I think the "Frankly, I suspect the book isn't even necessary" is one of my favorite lines in anything, ever. Knowledge can be transferred from one person to another in a lot of ways, only one of which is through the written language. And words can be useful, but we need to be careful where we're getting them from and why we're using them.
DeleteI have also had some wonderful English teachers! Good English teachers are part of why I want to be an English teacher. However, many (or all) of them seemed to be extremely invested in the idea of a canon; that is, that there is a set of books or texts or knowledge that is more important than other books or texts or knowledge. The idea of "classic" literature, that there are some books that everyone just "has to read" bothers me, because it suggests that these are more important to EVERYONE. Now, there are definitely some books that I find very important to me, and that helped me understand the world or humanity or anything else, but that doesn't mean that anyone else will feel the same about those books. And I want to caution my students against this idea that there is a certain set of knowledge or point of view that is more important than others.
I apologize for putting down English teachers; evidently, it was only my experience to have teachers like this.