Critical analysis of textbooks: knowledge-generating logics and the emerging image of ‘global economic contexts’

Thoma, Michael

doi:10.1080/17508487.2015.1111248

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Textbooks, therefore, represent a kind of legal tender for educational services because they carry an implicit, institutional endorsement. Such endorsement validates what social norms textbooks may convey (Thoma, 2017) as required truths for the procurement of knowledge. However, can knowledge as an implied commodity exist without power and/or ideology?…”

Section: Current Trends In Critical Discourse Studies Of Textbookssupporting

confidence: 65%

Current Trends in Critical Discourse Analyses of Textbooks: A Look at Selected Literature

Smith

Sheyholislami

2022

CJAL

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Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has increasingly served to examine the content of textbooks. Given momentum by critical social inquiry pertaining to textbook content, this study looks at peer-reviewed literature drawn from three scholarly databases (JSTOR, ERIC, and SAGE; cross-referenced with searches on Google Scholar) that use critical discourse analysis for those investigations. Reviewing the selected literature, this study asks: What are the most represented approaches of CDA used for examining textbooks? What contextual themes appear to draw the most attention? In what fields of study are the examined textbooks situated? How do these emergent themes appear to be connected? What areas of research appear lacking in the collected literature? The findings illustrate that, while the methods of CDA and types of textbooks examined are diverse, the lion’s share of contextual attention and critical utility appear to be given to foundational approaches to CDA and textbooks used for English language teaching. Further research directions on textbooks from a CDA perspective are discussed.

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Section: Current Trends In Critical Discourse Studies Of Textbookssupporting

confidence: 65%

Current Trends in Critical Discourse Analyses of Textbooks: A Look at Selected Literature

Smith

Sheyholislami

2022

CJAL

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“…Namely, Prior's and Cooren's views on the study of documents and social organizing emphasize the significance of nonhuman textual agency, whereby words function as the building blocks of social agents. Concerning this, textbook studies referring to post‐structuralist perspectives would further view discourses as fluid forms of knowledge that may materialize the intertextual relations of different body‐subjects and their ways of experiencing the world (see also Ostendorf & Thoma, 2012; Thoma, 2017). Society and culture thus emerge through the documents and their interconnected chain of discursive agents, both of which aid in (un)noticing, stating, reporting, and choosing individual/collective behaviour as they thread semantic relations of human bodies and actions.…”

Section: Alternative Perspectives On Textbooksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking textbooks as active social agents in interpretivist research

Goh

2022

The Curriculum Journal

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Textbooks are artifacts. They are made, used, interpreted, and understood in a wide range of ways. In this sense, regardless of its theoretical assumptions, textbook analysis is an evolving and pioneering task as textbooks bring about manifold knowledge, relationships, and emotions. When exploring the texts, images, and functions in and beyond the textbooks, researchers would recognize textbooks as interactive subjects in the social world rather than simply as content carriers. Although content analysis has long been employed as a methodology for textbook analysis, there are multiple pathways to investigate textbooks. The paper pays specific attention to interpretivist methodologies that may allow researchers to see the textbooks' interactive performance and impacts on others and researchers themselves. First, the paper reviews and pieces together previously established approaches and orientations of textbook studies. Second, the paper attempts to build a broad framework for analysing textbooks based mainly on Prior's and Cooren's arguments about reconceptualizing documents and texts, respectively. Third, the paper explores the implications of the analysis mentioned earlier and examines two interpretivist research methodologies, including symbolic interactionism and autoethnography, to open up the possibilities of rethinking textbooks as active social agents in human life instead of repositories of information and ideologies.

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“…Discourses are conceptualised as empirical objects with determinable characteristics and super situational in scope. As a specific discursive formation, they possess a particular form of 'regularity and consistency' (Foucault 1972, 179) and display a reconstructable logic (see also Thoma 2017). Objectivations are conceived as materialised discursive processes such as laws, regulations, formal procedures, institutions, artefacts and policy documents (Bührmann and Schneider 2008).…”

Section: Dispositive As An Analytical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teacher subjectivation in the quality dispositive: the example of VET in Austria

Hautz

Thoma

2021

British Journal of Sociology of Education

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Current reforms in vocational education and training (VET) are characterised by a constant striving for quality assurance and improvement. To this end, a powerful reform network has emerged that shapes the subjectivation processes of teachers. Drawing on Foucault (1980), we term this complex formation a 'dispositive' . The paper introduces dispositive analytics as an innovative approach for educational research. Taking Austria as an example of a 'broader understanding' of VET (Avis 2014) we address the question of how VET teachers' subjectivity is shaped by the quality dispositive. The study investigates subject positions that refer to the ways teachers should be and act. Furthermore, qualitative interviews with VET teachers were conducted to examine which dispositional quality logics they tend to internalise and which forms and strategies they express to subvert the quality dispositive. The analysis reveals that the current reform network creates tensions in the subjectivation processes leading to experiences of de-professionalisation.

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Critical analysis of textbooks: knowledge-generating logics and the emerging image of ‘global economic contexts’

Cited by 9 publications

References 12 publications

Current Trends in Critical Discourse Analyses of Textbooks: A Look at Selected Literature

Current Trends in Critical Discourse Analyses of Textbooks: A Look at Selected Literature

Rethinking textbooks as active social agents in interpretivist research

Teacher subjectivation in the quality dispositive: the example of VET in Austria

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