Understanding the Other: Cross-national textbook discourse on the rights and experiences of marginalized groups

• In Event: Cross-national and historical comparisons of curriculum and textbooks

Abstract

This paper examines the manner and extent to which topics and narratives concerning marginalized groups, rights discourses, and multiculturalism have changed in primary and secondary school social science textbooks across the world during the past century. Our study follows existing cross-national textbook studies in the World Society tradition that have examined various diversity-related issues by analyzing how social science textbook discourse on human rights applied to various marginalized groups changed from the mid-20th century onwards. These studies have found that since the creation of the United Nations, the traditional nation-centric educational model has been increasingly undercut by the proliferation of textbook content concerning rights for different groups, as well as the perspectives of these diverse groups, within national societies. Through the World Society lens, these findings are explained by the diffusion of human rights discourse into national school curricula across the world through the agencies of globally-oriented institutions that developed after World War II.
However, as no previous cross-national analyses examined textbook content in the first half of the 20th century, our study seeks to extend this theoretical orientation by examining cross-national textbook content prior to World War II, in order to understand whether the rise of diversity-related textbook content within national societies is, in fact, a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century. We posit that the League of Nations may have also contributed to diversity-related global discourse during the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s.
Our sample consists of approximately 1,000 social sciences secondary school textbooks published from 1890 to the present, including civics, geography, history, and social studies books from approximately 100 countries around the world. These dates encapsulate the entire 20th century, with a 10-year window before and after the century in order to examine any notable trends in the adjacent centuries. While we do not have equal numbers of textbooks from each country or each year in our sample, we have selected books that achieve a balance across decades and world regions. The textbooks were coded using a standardized protocol that sought to identify patterns across multiple texts. The possibility of coding error through challenges in translation has been minimized by conducting multiple inter-rater reliability tests in developing our coding scheme, hiring fully bilingual translators as coders, sitting with translators as they coded books to address any questions or uncertainties, and reviewing each coding sheet to check for inconsistencies.
We capture whether a given textbook emphasizes diversity by looking at a) whether the following sub-national population groups are discussed in at least a paragraph, b) whether their rights are explicitly discussed, and c) whether they are explicitly discussed as experiencing marginalization or discrimination: children, women, immigrants, other minorities, and workers. We conduct descriptive statistical analyses to understand cross-national trends over time in the incorporation of these narratives in textbooks during the time period under study. Our findings suggest that narratives concerning marginalized groups, rights discourses, and multiculturalism were present and expanding already in the aftermath of the First World War: evidence of such incipient universalist values can thus be considered a precursor to contemporary diversity and rights narratives. By virtue of examining curricular trends across an entire century and in a broad range of sovereign countries, our study therefore offers a rare longitudinal global perspective on how and where topics and narratives concerning marginalized groups, rights discourses, and multiculturalism expand in the educational materials of nation-states around the world.

Authors

• Jeremy Jimenez, Stanford Graduate School of Education

• Julia Lerch, Stanford Graduate School of Education

• Naejin Kwak, Stanford University