Textbooks as Mediators in the Intellectual Project of History Education (Katalin Morgan)

I feel a little like an ‘alien’ sharing my research on this platform, given that I have no history in Canada, never having travelled there. But somehow I sense the joy of the vibrant research community committed to finding out more about history and its teaching and learning. It is infectious and that is why I am here.

Although my research is about South African history textbooks, my personal history stretches across Europe and across various disciplines other than history and education. I came to history rather belatedly when in 2004 I had the privilege of visiting New York City for an extended period of time and that was when I became fascinated with history, wondering how such an awesome place could have been created from scratch. Combined with this, and resulting from having partly grown up in Germany, I have also always had an interest in the history of the Holocaust. So when an opportunity arose in 2007 to teach an online course for international educators on “The Holocaust and Human Behaviour,” hosted by Facing History and Ourselves, I jumped at it. This was a turning point. At that time I was also teaching social studies and history to high school students. I realized that this topic has power to mediate knowledge about how the seeds of prejudice and stereotypes can grow into unimaginable cruelty on a large scale. I also realized that there are some parallels between this topic and the racial discrimination under apartheid rule that bears a heavy legacy in South Africa to this day. But I was less interested in the abundant politics of transformation than with investigating theoretical and disciplinary knowledge pertaining to history and educational media.

As I also gained some experience in the academic publishing industry and with digital/multi-media educational resources, I wanted to find a topic for a PhD study that would somehow combine all these interests and experiences. The answer was almost staring me in the face: the topic of “the impact of 19^th-century race theories leading to genocide” is contained in grade 11 history textbooks. So I decided to analyze it in all ten officially approved titles (in South Africa public/state schools must choose textbooks from a list). I also intended to follow it up with some classroom research. But it never came to this because the data soon became so voluminous that classroom research will now have to wait for postdoctoral study. To overcome the resultant narrow focus, I reasoned that textbooks are important to study in their own right because they are artifacts representing a sociocultural inheritance, encoded in language and images, as they record the education system’s epistemological position in a ‘slice in time’ with the prevailing mindset in it. I wanted to find out how texts construct or encode this mindset, and how the strategy of their constructors can be recognized or decoded.

In essence, the study sought to answer two questions: Firstly, how can an interdisciplinary approach to textual analysis be utilized to construct a model for such an analysis? And secondly, how can such a model be demonstrated ‘in action’ to analyse one theme in a series of history textbooks? With this aim in mind, I devised five analytical categories or dimensions, namely “making own historical knowledge,” “learning empathy,” “positioning a textual community,” fashioning stories,” and “orientating the reader.”

Putting this analytical model to work led to findings which indicated that only a few books were successful mediators of the intellectual project of history education. This posed the question of what the weaker books did achieve instead. One is the perpetuation of stereotypes which is evident through the strong positioning of a textual community towards  a specific brand of citizenship education rather than pursuing history as a process of discovery. I concluded that textbook writers have many choices in how to address the intellectual project of history education, and that while they all operate within the same limits, their solutions to curriculum ideals vary remarkably.

Currently I am busy writing papers for publication based on my PhD research, already having published a few. In future I would like to research/design other educational media devoted to history teaching, gain knowledge about how to make learning history fun and engaging, and investigate how to harness the power of technology to these ends.