Separation of Church and State Curricula? Examining Public and Religious Private School Textbooks (Poster 34)

• In Event: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Curricular materials not only impart academic knowledge but also prepare children for citizenship by teaching them societal values. Consequently, changes in curriculum have been shown to impact children’s worldviews and academic outcomes. Given the importance of what we teach our children, we know very little about the educational content children are exposed to outside the public school system. In particular, there is little to no research on what children are taught in religious educational settings. Our study will begin to fill in this knowledge gap by comparing the content of influential religious textbooks with the content of state-adopted textbooks from Texas and California. Specifically, we focus applying and improving methods of computer-driven content analysis to measure how different topics such as climate change or slavery and different races and genders are portrayed within different sets of education materials over time.

Author

• Emileigh Harrison, University of Chicago