Bloggery 1: Textbooks a curse?

In a word, yes.

In this bloggery I will extend Daniels’ and Zemelman’s arguments to my own experience of teaching. Daniels and Zemelman (2014) identify a laundry list of criticisms of content area textbooks, and even summon up some advantages as well. The advantages are these. Textbooks have information in a dense format that can be paired well to the curriculum or standards of your state or district. At their most ideal, textbooks have just the right amount of information to support each lesson covering the broad content of the course, as mandated by your governing authority.

So my first philosophical criticism is this. If this ideal textbook were to enter the class, then why not just make the class a correspondence course using  text-based assessments? The heart and soul of teaching history is understanding the multiple perspectives offered by various people with various values that guide their thinking. The point of knowing history is to talk about with other people and learn from it together. No matter how well written, as the above authors mention, no textbook can ever be so balanced, so broad, so deep, and still be under a thousand pages with few errors.

I have seen students blasted by textbooks with shotgun-facts. Thousands of little factoids, mostly without context or a larger theme to give them continuity or purpose. Its just a massive game of trivia for trivia’s sake. Daniels and Zemelman suggest that instruction should be centered around carefully selected texts, and supported by a classroom set of textbooks to use as references. This gives the teacher the freedom to find and choose voices from history that best address the central focus, in the most culturally relevant way.

In short, text books have their place; on the shelf. The way we are using them they are sucking our money away, breaking our students’ backs, and filling their heads with a meaningless soup of details that give them little or no sense of the great conversation that is living inside of history.

Subjects Matter, Second Edition: Exceeding Standards Through Powerful Content-Area Reading (Authors: Daniels & Zemelman), 2014 edition.