Journal of Educational Memory, Media, and Society

This thematic issue addresses nature and society as categories of analysis in Portuguese and Spanish textbooks. It starts from the premise that the natural and social sciences both provide a valuable and relevant basis with which to understand the world. Nature is examined from a sociopolitical and environmental perspective in the context of the international new paradigms and political discourses of the 1970s and 1980s concerning environmental conservation. Despite their different but parallel political trajectories during their transitions and democratic consolidations—Spain and Portugal evolved without mutual influence—they were exposed to the same international impact. Although the complex domestic affairs and reforms in these countries were conditioned by new environmental and feminist trends and movements, the reception of these phenomena in society and politics was not reflected in the latter's textbooks.

In the 1980s, there were major international meetings to promote environmental education, just as there had been in the 1970s. Spain wanted to participate in actions adopted at these meetings by signing inter-ministerial agreements, organizing congresses, and promoting the work carried out by the Spanish National Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICONA). Environmental issues were even tackled in school classrooms through seminars and talks with the aim of raising awareness of a problem that affected everyone and that would worsen as time went by. Our work attempts to analyze these political actions and events and, above all, to analyze how environmental issues were incorporated into textbooks. Despite all of the above, we found that the incorporation of environmental education into Spain's primary education curriculum and textbooks was not significant.

In the mid-1970s, after the end of military dictatorships, Spain and Portugal experienced a transition to democracy that promoted the establishment of regimes committed to achieving gender equality in public and private life. Women saw significant advancements in education and employment rights, enabling them to have more job opportunities. Using critical discourse analysis, we examine the socio-occupational representation of women in primary textbooks from Spain and Portugal from 1974 to 1982 in order to assess whether state-approved textbooks accurately reflected the reframed female role in society. The results show a lack of female characters depicted in economically rewarding roles and the persistent presence of gender segregation in the workforce's horizontal and vertical dimensions.

This article deals with the study of natural sciences in non-compulsory secondary education from the end of the nineteenth century until the educational reform in 1970. We begin with a critical review of the ways in which the secondary education curriculum and textbooks of this period conveyed established knowledge about natural sciences. We then examine the evolution of natural sciences textbooks and successive editions thereof produced by different publishers in terms of their design, structure, content, and context, methods which are complemented by information concerning authorship and commercial viability. We conclude by arguing that, since textbook publishers did not undertake substantial innovations between 1970 and the mid-1980s, traditional nineteenth century natural sciences school knowledge prevailed into the 1990s.

The objective of this article is to explore the relationship between concepts relating to nature and production and, by extension, to work, personal prosperity, and Spain's economic growth, as portrayed in compulsory education textbooks between 1965 and 1990. To this end, in our investigation we scrutinize the evolution of the conception and presentation of work, consumer relations, and economic relations in school curricula and in the discursive form that they ultimately took in Spanish school textbooks. In the course of the article, we identify the continuities found in school textbooks as well as the novelties that began to appear with the beginning of developmentalism in Spain.

This article deals with visual representations of children in social and natural science primary education textbooks from Spain and Portugal during the final years of dictatorship, transition to democracy, democratic consolidation, and democracy between 1965 and 1995. It explores ways in which children are addressed and made visible in social and natural environments and what kind of relationships with these milieus are established. With reference to processes of social and political reconfiguration of the individual and society, environmental awakening, the strengthening of children's rights, and the transformation of the design, textuality, and knowledge contained in textbooks, it shows how textbooks contribute to the self-perception and identity formation of children. The results reveal an underrepresentation of those for whom the textbooks are intended, a contemplative social representation, and a shortage of natural spaces.

The time frame of this article covers the Portuguese transition to democracy in the 1970s until the 1990s, when democratic institutions operated fully. The focus lies on the way in which changes in the conceptualization of nature and society and their mutual relationship were reflected in secondary education textbooks. We explore whether and how knowledge about both domains provided in textbooks contributed toward democratic education and toward the exercise of citizenship at a time when democracy was in the making. Both natural sciences and history textbooks express environmentalist concerns and promote an ecological perspective. History textbooks frame these concerns in the social, cultural, and political contexts of the time.