Journal of Educational Memory, Media, and Society

This article argues in favor of including students in textbook research. As teachers decide which textbooks to use in their classrooms, they are the ones who influence textbook development. The article presents a research review of students' evaluations of textbooks, demonstrating that inviting students into the debate may result in interesting stimuli for improving textbooks. The article also discusses suggestions based on student feedback.

Since the early 1990s, the concept of historical consciousness has been central to didactic research in Sweden. It has mostly been used as a theoretical framework on a macro-level or as an attempt to identify students' historical consciousness. This article applies the theoretical concept of historical consciousness to tangible source material: history textbooks from the twentieth century. It focuses on whether Swedish history textbooks for lower secondary school have articulated contexts that may be conducive to developing historical consciousness. The article employs a number of theoretical concepts—narratives, multichronology, identity, and values—in order to analyze perspectives that can be utilized to trigger historical consciousness.

This article examines textbooks, especially history textbooks, seeking to contribute to an emerging body of scholarship that endeavors to understand the nature, specific properties, and characteristics of this medium. Using systemic functional linguistics and a context-based perspective of language as its theoretical point of departure, it argues for a dual imagining of the textbook as discourse and genre. In imagining the textbook, the article calls for a rethinking of comparative textbook research in the future, based on a novel cluster of conceptual priorities deriving from postmodern thought.

This article addresses the Dual Narrative Approach (DNA) as applied to a sample group of Palestinian students in Israel. This approach is implemented in the dual narrative textbook developed by the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME). The textbook was originally developed for history teaching in both the state of Israel and the Palestinian National Authority. The particular situation of Palestinians living in Israel raises an important question of the implementation of this approach in Palestinian-Israeli schools. This sample group is particularly interesting as within the State of Israel only the Jewish-Israeli historical narrative is officially taught in schools, even in the Arab-Palestinian schools. For many of the students tested in this study, this textbook was their first exposure to their own narrative. This article is an empirical study that uses the "mixed methods approach," investigating the students' reactions to the dual narrative textbook with specific regard to the narrative of the events of 1948, one of the most contentious periods for these two nations.

This article analyzes history, civics, and national education textbooks used between grades seven to twelve of the Palestinian and Jordanian school systems from a gender perspective. It focuses on the ways in which men and women are presented within the context of the prevalent culture, which portrays men as the more superior, capable, creative, productive, and therefore dominant, and women as weaker, inferior, dominated, and thus unable to play more than minor roles. As culture affects the perceptions, desires, and ambitions of both males and females, it becomes a key factor in changing the role of women in modern society, and is developed and transferred from one generation to another. This study also emphasizes the need to identify the approaches toward gender adopted by the curricula of Jordan and Palestine, as well as the nature of the language they use. The results from the sample used in this study indicate that although the stereotyping of men and women in both the public and the private sectors varies according to school grade and subject, there is an obvious bias in favor of men.

This article examines how middle school history textbooks published between 1951 and 1995 explain the origins of the Japanese as an ethnic group (minzoku). The analysis shows that despite the relatively long period from which the sample of textbooks was taken, these texts continue to emphasize two categories of Japanese identity: a biologically heterogeneous people through prehistoric immigration and a unified language. Building on the latter theme, the textbooks continued to treat the innovation of the kana as a quintessential development underlying the Japanese cultural achievement. The analysis reveals that the narrative tone shifted from being emotive in the early 1950s texts to somewhat muted in later decades.

School history atlases are used almost exclusively as required textbooks in Central and Eastern Europe, where the model of the ethnolinguistic nation-state rules supreme. My hypothesis is that these atlases are used in this region because a graphic presentation of the past makes it possible for students to grasp the idea of the presumably "natural" or "inescapable" overlapping of historical, linguistic, and demographic borders, the striving for which produced the present-day ethnolinguistic nation-states. Conversely, school history atlases provide a framework to indoctrinate the student with the beliefs that ethnolinguistic nationalism is the sole correct kind of nationalism, and that the neighboring polities have time and again unjustly denied the "true and natural" frontiers to the student's nation-state.

This article investigates the potential of one of the most contested and debated spaces of German Studies research, the Postdamer Platz in Berlin, as an interactive "textbook." By employing the notion of "play" the areas around the commercialized Postdamer Platz can be "read" and explored as contradictory, chaotic, messy, and haunted by ghosts of the past, despite—or possibly amplified by—the newly constructed, glossy surfaces of global media and capitalism that form a center for the German capital. I consider the subversive possibilities as well as the limits of this playful approach to teaching, exploring, and learning about commercialized urban centers in the twenty-first century.

This article traces the developments within history textbook research as presented at the 2009 conference of the International Society for History Didactics (ISHD), held in cooperation with the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig, Germany. The article claims that significant developments reveal school historiography to be a challenged area for history didactics. Key concepts and theoretical frames require further discussion in order to develop history didactics not only as an area for social and political responsibilities but also as a theoretical discipline.