Social Activism in Elementary School Textbooks: Textbook Analysis

• In Event: Beyond Borders: Exploring Civic Engagement through Comprehensive Data

Proposal

Many educators and scholars understand children's activism as a potential that can and should be developed. As Dewey (1938) stated, progressive education should provide developmentally appropriate, socially engaging learning opportunities. School-based social activism initiatives offer great potential to promote civic participation, self-efficacy, and healthy youth development (Torres-Harding et al., 2018). This theoretical framework provides bases for understanding children's activism. Nevertheless, children's skills in praxis and collaboration are seen as valuable but implicitly conditional. In order to implement social activism, teachers should provide opportunities for children to work together, name inequities, and identify actions they can take to work for change. Consistently, scholars assume that a teacher's instruction is required before children can develop these skills (Simon, 2009). Research on social activism skills development suggests that students who had a basic understanding of science tended to express activism more frequently, and as their science knowledge improved following the lesson, so did their expression of activism (Lester et al., 2006). While understanding the teachers' role, it is essential to emphasize that textbooks greatly influence teaching approaches and raise awareness of the political background of educational goals, textbook selection, and approval. Also, as Apple (2003) states, simplified textbooks lead toward conservative and simplified teaching.
Appreciating the importance of textbooks, the research methodology behind this study is textbook analysis research. This study is grounded on two bodies of literature, including (1) social justice instruction (Dover, 2013; Wassell et al., 2019); and (b) science, technology, and society (STS) instruction (Lester et al., 2006; Havu-Nuutinen et al., 2018). The literature review resulted in the definition of the social activism concept as understood by curriculum creators, textbook authors, educators, and researchers. This definition allows for assembling a list of fundamental concepts for identifying and classifying concepts derived from the examined elementary school textbooks.
The goal of textbook research is to discover how attributions and patterns develop and how they are transmitted and manifested in the classroom (Sammler, 2018). Four specific questions are being asked about the social activism-related concepts in the selected elementary school textbooks:
1. What social activism-related concepts are represented in the selected textbooks?
2. What are the most frequently appearing concepts from the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences presented in the selected textbooks?
3. What is the prevalent type of presentation and sequence of the activism-related concepts in the selected textbook?
4. Are the concepts fundamental to the academic disciplines that form the knowledge foundation of the studies?
In order to reach the research objective and answer the posed research questions, we have adopted and tailored the UNESCO textbook research guidelines (Pingel, 2010) to the following steps: (1) description of the pedagogical environment - more specifically, textbooks are interpreted against the curriculum background; (2) decision on the number and the type of textbooks to be examined; (3) didactic analysis - the methodological approach to the topic and the pedagogy behind the text; (4) content analysis - the level at which the selected textbooks cover the topic in question; (5) formulation and interpretation of the findings.
The sample for the study is fifth through eighth-grade textbooks from three school subjects (i.e., Croatian Language, Geography, and History) published between 2021 and 2023. These books were readily available to the researcher and used by teachers in Croatian elementary schools. Concepts related to social movement, social activism, service learning, community learning, and volunteering are identified and analyzed by school discipline for presence, presentation type, and sequencing. The study findings indicate a strong presence of the identified concepts in the analyzed textbooks, with differences among natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences textbooks. The study findings could serve as a guideline for educational policymakers, curriculum designers, textbook authors, and teachers involved in textbook design and selection.

Author

• Ivana Batarelo Kokic, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split