The Value of a Good History textbook
I just listened to the Textbooks episode of The Staff Room, a podcast by two Ontario middle school
teachers.
Seriously, check it out, it is worth a half-hour of your time! I love that Pav and Chey get into
some real talk about textbooks! They hit the nail on the head when they say that "textbook" has become
a bit of a bad word; that you're not a good teacher if you're still using a textbook. There are whole
educational movements encouraging teachers to stop using textbooks, and you can get some glares
if you try to defend them.
I think they really got the reality of it right, though. A textbook is only one tool in the teacher's toolkit. We are well-educated, smart people who can use a number of tools at our disposal to launch inquiries, to lay the foundations and to inspire learning. A textbook can be one of those tools, and need not be discarded like the proverbial baby with the bathwater. They explained how textbooks can have really well-constructed lessons that really work for our students. I know I've learned a lot of great pedagogical moves from some of the more excellent textbooks that I've used.
Pav and Chey had a lot more experience with Math and Science textbooks and language arts teaching and only had one piece of advice for the history textbook, which was to use it as an example of bias and "what not to do." While I agree that history textbooks (and curriculum, and classrooms, etc.) are much more likely to get outdated quickly, and that there are many older textbooks that I would only use to do this "examine the bias" work. There are many newer, really important and effective textbooks for use in history, geography and social science/social studies classrooms that do far more than provide an example of what not to do.
And now is the time for full disclosure, I've written or revised/provided pedagogical advice for quite a few textbooks and learning resources for grades 7-11. I have a lot of strong feelings (backed by evidence - see James Loewen's book, Lies My Teacher Told Me) of how much damage a bad textbook can do to students, their communities and democracy as a whole. For sure, we should not be using bad, old books except as a critical literacy activity.
That doesn't help the teacher who suddenly finds themselves teaching hundreds of years of history that they themselves don't know, or thousands of years of history that they also don't know. This is the normal state of affairs, even in high school, subject specialists who took any post-secondary courses in the particular history they might be teaching are rare.
In the podcast, Chey and Pav point out that there are lots of great online videos and other resources for science, math, and language arts that can really enrich the classroom and get beyond the textbook. I totally agree! Do more interactive things, include short videos, have students watch lectures on mitosis or whatever.
This body of online resources DOES NOT EXIST for Canadian History in the same way that it does for Math and Science topics. Much of the World History content I've found is way too young for my grade 11 class or is tourism sites, or conspiracy theories, etc. If we are going to engage our students in purposeful inquiry learning so that they can consider multiple perspectives and histories we need textbooks and other resources that can help us get there!
One example of the kind of resource that is available now in some newer History textbooks and resources are balanced collections of historical documents with a critical question that is founded on historical thinking. Oh, and the documents (political cartoons, paintings, photographs, maps, letters, diaries speeches, etc.) need to be ones that students can actually read and access at their own literacy level. This is not something that I, as a classroom teacher, can whip up the night before!
I'm not saying that the textbooks I've worked on are perfect. As the Ontario Black History Society has pointed out, quite rightly, with their Blacked Out History campaign, there are serious gaps even in more modern textbooks, which is still highlighting the serious challenge that history teachers face.
The level of research and review that goes into writing a textbook is huge!
This was the biggest thing I learned in the process of writing textbooks. In my classroom,
I don't have access to equity reviewers, historians, archives, literacy reviewers, master teachers with
decades of experience, and elders and knowledge keepers, let alone the editorial staff, graphic designers and photo researchers. Even if I wanted to, I don't have time to pull together a well-balanced set of documents and excerpts that balance all relevant points of view and are paired with an engaging and important inquiry question! That kind of thing takes months! And a whole team!
| A companion textbook that I worked on with Indigenous educators and knowledge keepers |
Granted, some of the juicier bits of history didn't make it into any textbooks - there
is only so much space after all - but that's why they can be so great when paired
with the internet and good pedagogy!
on the page where we talk about Baltej Singh Dhillon, who fought for the right to wear a turban while serving in the RCMP, we have an iconic picture of Dhillon in his RCMP uniform. We didn't include this image of a pin produced by a racist campaign against Dhillon while he was fighting in the courts. BUT, that image and the link to the video are included in the teacher guide.
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| Baltej Singh Dhillon, 1990 from The Canadian Encyclopedia |
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| Pin from the anti-turban campaign. From CBC Archives, 1990 |
We actually ended up including 300 primary source documents in the text itself, and then another 600 in the teacher's guide.
The textbook was not designed to be used from day 1 to day 100, it was designed to meet the needs of real teachers in real classrooms in the 21st century, trying to engage their kids in history and democracy.
Sometimes when I hear the anti-textbook conversation, I definitely agree. Textbooks can be limiting or damaging. But there is still a need for well-researched, balanced, contemporary resources in the classroom. If "ditching the textbooks" is used as a justification for pulling funding from classrooms and putting more work on the already-overworked teacher, I am NOT on board.
I've always written resources to help support teachers and maybe push us a little to learn a few more tricks, to gain a few more tools for our toolkit. A good resource should have a longer life than the time that it's relevant in the classroom. A teacher should be able to learn something about their craft from a well-designed resource. But most importantly, there is a desperate need for good Canadian history and social studies textbooks that help teachers do the important work of laying the groundwork for democratic citizenship.
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