Textbooks and citizenship education

Abstract

This paper relates an investigation that tries to listen to children's voices about the social studies textbooks they would like to use the following year. It was developed in nine elementary classrooms. Children answered an open question, in a written form, about what they liked and disliked in their textbooks. They were then asked to select three pages they liked and three they did not like, and give reasons. The children loved this particular task. I did not have an explicit hypothesis but I thought they would mainly choose pages related to subject matters they preferred, illustrations and so on. I also thought that they would refer to environmental issues, mainly pollution. The most important result of this study arose from the pages selection. It was very difficult to understand their answers. They chose pages mainly due to four motivations: the tasks, the subject matter, the aesthetics, and also what was represented - the behaviours, good or bad, most of them citizenship education related. These choices were surprising because textbooks do not value the development of attitudes and values.