Rethinking textbooks as active social agents in interpretivist research

Abstract

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.