Hello to all of my seminar classmates. Here is my thought of the hour, amidst all the jumbled thoughts in my brain. Have you really looked at your textbooks? Not the University texts: I mean the ones we all used in high school.
While preparing for my socials 11 examination, I read through the provincial textbook, and even showed it off to a few of you. I'm pretty sure some of you recognized it. What I found disconcerting however, was the lack of information. In some cases, an entire event was referred to in one sentence. That's less than 50 words! And, sometimes, the information was so biased that I tossed the textbook aside and researched online until I was sure that I had found correct information.
The entire process was very frustrating, and I kept thinking, did I really believe all of this in high school? Was I that naive?
After the exam, I sort of forgot all about it, until my socials curriculum prof gave the class an excerpt of the first two pages of the grad ten socials textbook. The first sentence:
At the dawn of the nineteenth century,
Canada was not the developed, prosperous country
it would eventually become.
Obviously, any sort of development by First Nations don't count. And it
gets worse from there: misleading information about Canada's involvement
in the American Civil War, the terrible injustice to only whites....
Which brings me to the back to my question:
How will you address the issue of bad textbooks, which either have too broad of a depth of knowledge, or inaccurate information?
By the way, this accidentally went onto the wrong blog... which means I had to repost. Sorry about that.
Hilary, I can tell you that being here in BC and doing the history of the BC education system has been a shock to me. I remember our texts books from Newfoundland (NFLD) and there is a great disparity between provinces.
ReplyDeleteWe are trying to raise our students to be proud of their nation (that's right, nation, not just province) however in NFLD I remember learning extensively about the Beothuks being the first settlers on the island and how we, as the new settlers pretty much slaughtered the majority of them within a few years of settling. We touched on the French settlers into New Brunswick; the parliament in Ontario; however no exploration into the development of each province was done. I had no idea about the Native American culture here in BC up until this semester began, and never considered the impact it would have on my teaching strategies. Beyond Capitals I, as a young student, learned nothing about Manitoba, Saskatchewan, or British Columbia.
When it comes to material that is available in our texts books, for me it would really depend on if they are writing a provincial exam or one that I will make up. If it is a provincial exam, then unfortunately I will focus more on the text book so that they are well prepared, however I will certainly bring in outside sources and information to hopefully ensure a well rounded student. If it is a local exam that I can create myself, then of course I will spend an equal time on various ideas. I am, for the most part, referring to socials since that was the issue you mentioned initially, but that can be transposed into other subject areas as well.
Again, referring to NFLD, I never studied Lord of the Flies or To Kill a Mockingbird because my teachers preferred to focus on local writers, and it was easy for us to understand the context and the events that would unfold within them. If I were to talk about an out port fishing community where second cousins constantly married and developed families, most people would cringe, but in the early settling of NFLD it was common place when a community was so secluded that it would take as little as two weeks to travel to another community. Random Passage was a book that we read; was a movie that was produced; and details exactly what I mentioned above. To teach that in a school in BC, it would require so much background information, that it would be a worry of mine that I could spend too much time on the history of it, therefore limiting the exploration of the book within the time allotted.
It is certainly an issue that will most likely never be resolved in terms of the text books that are produced, so it will be up to us as instructors to filter out the right from wrong; good from bad; and introduce material that we feel is important. Would it be beneficial to my students to learn about the beginnings of NFLD, or would that take away from the history of the local environment? Am I qualified to answer that question for my students, or should I let them have input? I don’t know.
Hi Hillary,
ReplyDeleteThis is a great observation. I would assume that most texts we read are never completely accurate, because they are created by people. Innately, even as authors, we will always have certain biases and prejudices that we cannot filter out of the texts that we create. This is why readers must be critical and aware of what they are viewing, regardless of the medium: advertisements, statistics, the news, popular literature and even academic sources. We are also learning in our Adolescent Psychology course that many academic studies are flawed, and that research is not always a trustworthy source of accurate information. However I am really surprised that such a common textbook (the one that I studied in Social Studies 10) would be so obviously biased and discriminatory.
Obviously, at sixteen, I was not concerned, or even aware, that my textbooks might be misleading or contain basic ideas that I should question. I assumed that my textbook contained the information that I needed to know in order to be a successful student. In fact, I still do this to some extent. If my teacher, or professor, chooses a textbook and bases my learning on it, I automatically regard it as a valuable source of information that I need to glean as much as possible from. I trust that, with all of their knowledge, training, and experience, my instructors will choose trustworthy and beneficial texts for their students to study. Even more than this, I would trust that our provincial government, with all of its resources and responsibility, would choose textbooks for the BC curriculum that best represent the history of our entire population. Clearly, this is not the case.
I am sure that many teachers have noticed and taken issue with the inconsistencies and prejudices that are evident in our provincially mandated curriculum. However, the resources that it would take to replace textbooks like these (even though they are probably 20 or 30 years old) is likely enormous and often out of reach for most school districts. Thus, as teachers, we need to provide our students with multiple texts to support their learning. Having many different opinions and sources of information presented to them will help our students realize the variety of opinions and “truths” that exist. We must also encourage our students to read critically and analyze everything that they view. This is a given in subject areas such as English or Art, but is obviously required across the curriculum in subjects that we usually consider concrete, such as Social Studies and the Sciences. No matter what subject we teach, we must be aware of the limitations and inaccuracies in our textbooks, and provide our students with skills that foster critical thinking.
Excellent analysis!
ReplyDeleteI'd like to take this opportunity to bring this topic back to the question of Indigenous populations and their history and representation (or lack thereof) in the curriculum and in the texts. After our "Blair Day" and discussing the collection of articles on the Tyee, I was motivated to check out the workshop at the EDSA Conference this weekend entitled "Non-Indigenous Educators as Allies" (or something like that!?) and one of the very first things the presenter spoke about was the problem with language and terminology that teachers use in today's classroosm. She began by writing the following words on the chalk-board:
ReplyDeleteFirst Nations
Native
Aboriginal
Indigenous
She then asked us if we felt confident knowing in which contexts it was PC, or acceptible to utilize these words. Turns out, we did not. This was the summary of her explanation:
First Nations: Avoid unless you are refrencing a SPECIFIC nation, ie: The Songees Nation. The problem with this term is that it is Nation specific, therefore does not include Indigenous people that identify as Metis or Inuit.
Native: TAKE OUT OF YOUR VOCABULARY ALL TOGETHER! This term is still used in textbooks today and the presenter told us that she has had Indigenous students leave SS classrooms and refuse to participate because they are so deeply offended that this word appears in print in classrooms to this day.
Aboriginal: Used when referencing Federal Government issues and that's about it. This is a government term.
Indigenous: The best one. The word students identify with.
Hilary, correct me if I am wrong here! But this got me to thinking about how I have been using these terms in the past, and how I might have continued to use them as an educator and not realized that I might be offending certain students unintentionally. Good stuff to know if we are going to be teaching in Canada, or anywhere really!
PS- the underground curriculum this Wednesday is offering a lecture on Residential Schools. If anyone was as interested in the subject matter discussed last week in Seminar I suggest you come with me. I know it's going to be a crazy week but we have to seize these opportunities when they are available!