Revealing a hidden curriculum in educational discourses: A study of the representation of Europe and Asia in Spanish and Japanese school textbooks

Abstract

This article addresses how Spanish and Japanese Social Science textbooks represent Europe and Asia discursively, and in what way the national viewpoint from each country is manifested in that representation. We analysed 15 textbooks used in secondary schools, and we focused on Geography and Civic Education subjects. Our analysis was developed mainly at semantic levels, and we examined the terms 'Europe' and 'Asia' answering four interrelated questions. We found that in both countries' textbooks, Europe is in general described in a positive or even idealized way as a developed and rich region, whereas Asia has a reverse negative image. Underlying this opposition, we can observe a Western ethnocentric view which takes Western development as the implicit standard to rank all societies hierarchically and builds discursively the dichotomy between developed and underdeveloped countries. 'Our' country's position in the world is also conditioned by this Western-centred perspective.

Textbooks as Resources for Education for Sustainable Development: A Content Analysis

“…Textbooks have not attracted much attention from researchers in terms of content analysis. However, a review of the existing literature can reveal that some discourse oriented research has been conducted with textbooks as the corpus (e.g., Gu, 2015;Shinabe, 2018;McCabe, 2004). In addition, these studies have not specifically focused on ESL/EFL textbooks.…”

Gender, critical pedagogy, and textbooks: Understanding teachers’ (lack of) mediation of the hidden curriculum in the EFL classroom

“…This agenda, known as the 'hidden curriculum', influences students' learning but also their personalities and worldviews -which affects their future opportunities (Gullicks et al, 2005;Leask, 2015). The hidden curriculum in textbooks has been studied from different angles, for example immigrants, refugees and language (Auerbach & Burgess, 1985), gender (Lee, 2014), and ethnocentrism (Shinabe, 2018). In gender and education, if the messages from the hidden curriculum relay gendered biases, students may come to accept the assumptions, which influences their development and leads to social inequalities (Kereszty, 2009;Lee, 2014Lee, , 2019.…”