Contextualized science teaching: the contribution of photographs included in school science textbooks

Abstract

Contextualized science teaching has to do with approaching themes from everyday settings that are relevant to students and making explicit the interrelationship between science and everyday life. Textbooks play an important role in the teaching and learning processes because they are a major source of information in teaching a particular subject. Therefore, textbooks should give a meaningful contribution to contextualized teaching, namely through good quality visual information (including photographs and photograph related visual tools), adapted to the target students’ characteristics. Thus, the objective of this paper is to compare photographs included in 8th and 11th grade textbooks, by three different publishers, between them and in terms of their potential to contribute to contextualized science teaching. Results indicate that the use of photographs is hardly guided by context-based science teaching principles and does not differ too much between the two grade levels. Therefore, teachers should carefully analyse textbooks before selecting the ones to be assigned in their school and when using a textbook they should explicitly deal with the possible weaknesses and the benefits of the visual material as well as with the way it is or can be used for the sake of contextualized science teaching.