Call for Chapter Proposals

Tentative Title:  (Re)Building Memory: School Textbooks, Identity, and the Pedagogies and Politics of Imagining Community

Editor: James Williams

Overview: Official school textbooks provide a rich source of material for those seeking to understand the larger social and political contexts and the effects of schooling. Textbooks provide official knowledge a society wants its children to acquire—facts, figures, dates, seminal events. Textbooks also frame the facts, figures, dates and events in a larger, though generally implicit, narrative that describes how things were, what happened, and how they came to be the way they are now. A group’s representation of its past is often intimately connected with its identity—who “we” are (and who we are not) as well as who “they” are.

Analysis of textbooks provides a lens through which a nation’s “intended” social and political “curriculum” can be examined. Comparative and longitudinal analyses provide a better understanding how such “curricula” vary across national contexts and change over time, particularly during periods of rapid social, political and cultural change. Analysis of the implicit “pedagogy” of teaching and learning in textbooks provides insight into the relationship envisioned between the student and history. Is history presented as an interpretation of events which are socially understood, constructed and contested, and in which the individual has both individual and social agency, or as a set of fixed, unitary and unassailable historical and social facts to be memorized?  Do students have a role in constructing history, or is it external to them? How is history presented when that history is recent and contested?

This edited book seeks to present and analyze a series of case studies of the portrayals of seminal historical events, of one’s own group, or of the “other.”  Of particular interest are the ways portrayals changed during periods of rapid transition, and differences in the ways similar issues are dealt with in different national contexts. It would be interesting, for example, to know how South African textbooks have changed since the end of apartheid, and why, and how that compares with what happened in Zimbabwe or Namibia or Ghana. Similarly it would be interesting to compare the portrayals of interactions between settlers and indigenous peoples in school textbooks in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and to see how those portrayals have changed over the past 40 years.  Contributors may focus on a particular topic over time within a particular country. Other contributors may be able to write about a particular topic as portrayed in several countries’ textbooks.  So, for example, a contributor might write about at the portrayal of American Indians over time in US textbooks.  Alternately, s/he might compare the portrayal of American Indians in US textbooks with that of Aboriginal peoples in Australian textbooks.  Or, s/he might compare changes in the portrayals of American Indians and of Australian Aboriginals over the past half century. Change may not be totally endogenous—controversies over portrayal of World War II in Japanese and German textbooks were international in scope.

In some cases, these issues have been well-studied, and so the trick would be to identify a new topic. In such cases, it may make most sense to synthesize and analyze existing research—what is known, not known, assumed, etc. In addition to content, we are interested in the pedagogy implicit in the presentation of textbooks. Is history presented as fixed and unquestioned, a narrative and set of facts to be memorized by students, or is it presented as an interpretation of events, always subject to revision and better understanding, and with students playing an active potential role?

The target audience is diverse—comparative and international educators, policy makers, international affairs and area studies specialists, conflict resolution specialists, history and social studies educators, curriculum planners, historians perhaps, and the general public. 

An initial draft outline of likely topics is presented below. Each of the main sections will contain a series of cases and a concluding chapter of analysis. The examples are only illustrative. A final outline will be developed on the basis of available cases and a publisher sought. When a publisher is engaged, contributors will be asked to make a final commitment.  A tentative deadline for manuscripts is December 2010.

Analytic Approach: A common set of analytic procedures and questions will be used for each case and a common outline for the chapters. Within the common procedures and chapter outline, there is considerable latitude for individual researchers to pursue and present the most salient lines of research.

Manuscripts: Submitted manuscripts should be 10,000 words or less.  A style sheet will be sent to those indicating interest as well as detail on common methods and questions to be utilized.

Timeline:         Soon as possible:         Informal expressions of interest

Proposals due:             March 31, 2010

Manuscripts due:         December 2010 (tentatively)

Proposals: To indicate interest, please send an email attachment in Word 97 format to James Williams at jhwtext@gmail.com, including your name, contact information and a paragraph on each of your proposed alternative chapters, as well as a vita. If possible, please include at least one alternative. Include the chapter title, a few sentences on the place(s) and issue you propose to research as well as the time period you will examine. If you are proposing a comparative analysis, give the rationale for selection of cases. Explain the local and broader relevance of the topic and in general terms what the analysis is likely to reveal. Also please indicate the textbooks you propose to examine (subject, grade level, representativeness) and note your access to them.

Initial Draft Outline

School textbooks are closely related to the nation and the state. Major sections of the book are organized along a series of characteristic state actions: States form and consolidate; they develop identities as to who “we” are and who “others” are; they periodically renegotiate these identities. States sometimes enter into conflict, and they must all make sense of the past.  

Section 1. Introduction and Theoretical Overview

Section 2. Nation-Building. Cases analyzing changes in textbooks during transition periods such as:

· Before and after independence – e.g., Ghana, Zimbabwe

· Periods of national revival – e.g., Czech Republic, Georgia, Israel

· While establishing state legitimacy – e.g., Turkey, Turkmenistan

Section 3. Representations of Self and “Other.”  Changing portrayals of self and “other”

· Self – e.g., Bosnia

· Internal “other” – e.g., Roma over the past decade

· External “other”— Pakistan/India/Kashmir

Section 4.  Re-Imagining the Community.  Cases in this section will analyze changes in textbooks when the assumptions about national unity are challenged or re-negotiated:

· Making room at the table for new groups—immigrants, indigenous peoples, historically marginalized groups, groups that never accepted legitimacy of state, gender—e.g., France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden vis immigrants;

· Multicultural societies –different approaches to multi-culturalization–e.g., Malaysia, Singapore, UK, Canada

Section 5. Conflict.  Texts in the context of conflict

· Post-conflict, internal–e.g., Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo

· Post-conflict, external: US, UK, Germany, Japan, Russia, Vietnam, Indonesia

· Ongoing conflict – Palestine/Israel  

· Coming under threat–US post 9/11

· Emerging from threat—South Africa, Russia-US post Cold War

· Textbooks for reconciliation–Northern Ireland

Section 6. The Past. Comparative analysis

· Discredited/negative events in past—US, Canada, Russia

· Controversies/persistent debates—Japan, US

· Myths – heroic, traumatic, exceptionalist—Serbia; US 

Section 7. Pedagogies

Section 8. Conclusions