What is a textbook, and how is that different from using something as a text with students?
2) The intransigent nature of the text as codification of the discipline
Despite the documented successes of non-standard uses of textbooks (e.g., students critiquing rather than using, re-writing ...) and disruption of the authors and audiences for the texts (students making their own textbooks for themselves and others, different groups of students comparing different texts as resources for their own learning, ...), the place of the textbook and its positioning of teachers and students persists. Why, how, and in whose interests?
3) Textbooks are sites of work-life struggle
Text materials are commonly used to de-skill teachers (they become cogs or conduits rather than designers of experience). When teachers approach their work creatively, responding to the lives of their students, this is often considered inappropriate. What are the implications?4) People need to see the textbook to know what the curriculum "is" - or else?
Isn't anything and everything in one's lifeworld a mathematics textbook? Why does this not so easily translate into understanding everyone as a mathematician whose "inner mathematician" has been thwarted from expression by school mathematics?
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| Rhizome - a la Deleuze & Guattari |
Questions as summarized on the board after coffee break:
ReplyDelete1. What is a textbook versus using something AS a text with students?
2. Despite all the creative alternative ways one could use a textbook, the textbook persists in positioning teaching and students ... why? how? in whose interests?
3. How can textbooks be constraining AND enabling for teachers?
4. How might textbooks prevent us from seeing our life-world as as text?
On constraining & enabling: c.f., De Certeau who wrote that social institutions wield strategies while individuals employ tactics. The socially constraining aspects of textbooks as strategies, e.g., de-skilling and de-professionalizing; tactics enable professional growth, reflection on teaching, collaborations among educators, etc.
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