The written texts students read in schools are the social and cultural artefacts of literacy education. Textbooks and primers are intentionally constructed for pedagogical purposes. That is, they are purpose-built for the selection, construction and transmission of valued knowledges and practices to novice and apprentice readers and writers. Textbooks constitute a formal corpus of texts, scientific or fictional, secular or non-secular, that students are required to study in order to be credentialled as literate by schools and other institutions.
The forms and contents, ideologies and discourses of textbooks constitute an official and authorised version of cultural knowledge and literate practice. The writing, production, selection and teaching of textbooks thus are part of the selective traditions of curriculum, the complex historical processes through which particular cultural and political interests construct what will count as valued knowledge. Because of their centrality in educational and language planning in nation states, textbooks remain key and frequently contested elements in the social construction of literacy.
Since the early twentieth century, textbooks have been studied and designed by reading researchers as linguistic and psychological phenomena with features and characteristics that are conducive to particular instructional approaches and outcomes (Chall & Squire, 1991). By contrast, social perspectives on textbooks have drawn upon sociological, sociolinguistic and ethnographic research and have been informed by contemporary discourse analytic, literary and social theory. From these perspectives, textbooks have been examined as ideological message systems for the transmission and reproduction of values and beliefs, as texts used in the literacy events of schools and communities, and as commodities in the competitive and controversial marketplaces of multinational publishing and state textbook adoption (e.g., DeCastell, Luke & Luke, 1989; Altbach, Kelly, Petrie & Weis, 1991; Apple & Christian-Smith, 1991).
With the advent of networked computer facilities in schools and classrooms, on-line texts are becoming the new media for primers and textbooks. Researchers have begun to examine how the texts of information technologies are used in classrooms, and how information technology software and on-line texts are making new demands of teachers and students.
2. Textbooks and Selective Historical Traditions
Cross-cultural and historical work demonstrates that the practices and consequences of literacy are constructed in relation to particular cultural, economic and social contexts and interests (Street, 1993). In schools, literate practices are constructed through the "message systems" (Bernstein, 1996) of curriculum, instruction and evaluation. As curriculum form and content, then, textbooks form a central element of what comes to count as literacy. From this perspective, they can be viewed as motivated sets of inclusions and exclusions of particular perspectives and practices, ideologies and voices in the canon of school knowledge.
The history of literacy education in the West provides evidence of the selective traditions of literacy represented in textbooks, primers and their affiliated approaches to instruction. In European manuscript culture, literacy education developed under the institutional control of church authorities (Graff, 1987). Teaching centred on reproductive and hermeneutic practices with sacred texts. Many of these traditions still feature in everyday religious practice, with edited versions of sacred texts used as textbooks in religious schools (e.g., Zinsser, 1986).
Mass produced textbooks were enabled by the development of the printing press in Western Europe. Developed for German schooling during the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther's textbooks had many of the prototypical characteristics of modern primers and basal readers. They were comprised of edited, abridged and sequenced versions of secular and religious texts (Luke, 1989). By the fifteenth century, textbooks, with accompanying examinations and school inspections, had become central to standardised approaches to literacy education.
These prototypes spread through the English-speaking and Protestant world, with the emergence of dedicated children's books like John Newbery's A Little Pretty Pocketbook (1744) in England and the later development of readers like Noah Webster's American Spelling Book (1793) and William McGuffey's Eclectic First Readers (1868) in the US, the Ontario Readers (1898) in Canada, and the Royal Readers (1901) in Australia. Series of graded readers began with introductory primers, and combined various literary genres (moral tales, folktales, rhymes) with word lists and lessons on grammatical rules (Venezky, 1987). The mass production of textbooks also was necessary for colonial and missionary education by the English, French, Spanish, Germans and Portuguese. The production of religious materials for use as textbooks by missionaries in indigenous and diasporic communities remains a large-scale publishing and pedagogical activity today (Kapitzke, 1995).
These developments prefigured the design principles of contemporary textbooks. Textbooks embodied assumptions about what children should read, when and according to which instructional approaches. Further, all were tools in the standardisation of national languages, a staple of 18th and 19th century nation building and imperialism. Their thematic content was morally and ideologically didactic. In their earliest forms, mass textbooks were not conceptualised as secular repositories of facts or data, or as technical tools for skill development. They were seen as vessels of moral knowledge, as normative means for initiating students into particular cultural, religious and political values and forms of life.
The twentieth century marked the advent of textbooks designed according to scientific principles by educational psychologists (Smith, 1964). A main aim of American basal reading series like the Curriculum Foundation Series (1927), widely known as the Dick and Jane Readers, was the standardisation of instruction across geographically and culturally diverse educational jurisdictions. William Gray, Paul Witty and their contemporaries reasoned that reading was a psychological phenomenon and that textbooks could be built to implement state of the art pedagogy. Mid-century basal readers provided graded, purpose-built literary texts and adjunct materials (e.g., workbooks, guidebooks) that incrementally introduced lexical and grammatical structures that, in turn, would induce particular reading behaviours. Teacher guidebooks were provided to "teacher-proof" the teaching of reading (Shannon, 1989). This approach was extended to the development of science, social studies, and mathematics textbooks, which could be marketed as part of comprehensive curriculum packages.
Mid-twentieth century American textbooks adopted a new literary style of social realism. The overt moral and religious themes of Protestant readers were replaced by portrayals of the new social and economic order of inter and post-war life in the West (Luke, 1988). In effect, a new genre of textbooks had been constructed, one that expressed modernist principles about the centrality and ideological neutrality of science and technology, and of literacy education itself.
None of this development would have been possible without the participation of increasingly powerful publishing companies. With the development of copyright laws and state-wide textbook adoption policies, textbooks became an increasingly profitable and competitive business (cf. Tyson-Bernstein, 1988). Publishers developed corporate branch-plants for the editing, revision and sales of American basal reading and other textbook series internationally. With the mass-marketing of readers across national borders in the post-war period, the multinational textbook had arrived (Altbach, 1987).
The early to mid-twentieth century thus marked the advent of the scientific construction and the corporate commodification of textbooks. With the postwar emergence of human capital models of education and "technocratic" approaches to literacy teaching (Freebody & Welch, 1993), research on textbooks was guided by the technical demands of curriculum and product development. In this context, social analyses of textbooks have been a relatively recent development.
3. Social Analyses of Textbooks
Social analyses of textbooks begin from the assumption that textbooks are not neutral vehicles for the inculcation of knowledges or skills. Significant research has examined the ideological messages and contents of textbooks, and their use and reconstruction in classroom literacy events. In the last decade, new research on the political economy of textbook production has emerged (e.g., Apple & Christian-Smith, 1991). That work has focussed on the complex economic, political and social forces and institutions involved in the production, marketing, selection and adoption of textbooks.
Textbook representations of the natural and social world, historical and contemporary events are expressed through particular semiotic and linguistic selections. Historically, these selections have and continue to generate debate and controversy among political interest groups, parents organisations and others who see textbooks and schooling as ideological battlegrounds. These debates include: ongoing American controversies over the representation of creationism and evolution in science textbooks; disputes over allegedly pornographic or sexist materials in children's literature; controversies over bias in representation of postcolonial cultures and economies of Asia, South and Central America; and debates in several countries about, for example, the portrayal of the events of World War II and the "Cold War" (e.g., DeCastell, Luke & Luke, 1989).
Beginning in the 1970s, content analysis focussed on the narrative versions of history, science, and on portrayals of gender, cultural difference and the political order in children's literature (e.g., Anyon, 1981). Using frameworks derived from literary and cultural studies, this work describes how textbooks marginalised the representation of cultural minorities and women (Taxel, 1986). More recent textbook research has developed interdisciplinary discourse analytic techniques to identify key ideologies, discourses and power relations. Functional linguistic analysis, for example, has critiqued the representation of scientific knowledge in social and natural science texts (Halliday & Martin, 1994). Techniques derived from narrative and ethnomethodological analysis have examined how primers and basal readers represent talk and social relations (Baker & Freebody, 1989) and the narrative consequences of cultural actions (Luke, 1988).
A key insight of literary and discourse analytic theory is that texts never have singular and unambiguous meanings but are always open to multiple possible interpretations and interpretive practices. Ethnographic studies of literacy have shown how cultures develop conventionalised "literacy events" that mediate how and what people read (Heath, 1982). That is, communities develop conventional patterns of interaction and criteria for text analysis and use. Once textbooks are "in use" in classrooms, teachers systematically lead students to a set of privileged interpretative practices, shaping how and what students do with textbooks. In this way, textbook knowledge and literate practice are shaped and reshaped by the contexts of classroom talk, with teachers directing and redirecting students' attention and comments towards particular pictorial and layout features, text structure and content (Lee, 1996; Baker & Freebody, 1989). In effect, textbook meaning and interpretation is reconstructed through classroom talk.
But the construction of textbook meaning is not simply a local, classroom issue. Larger commercial and political forces strongly influence the kinds of books that actually reach the classroom. Textbooks are commodities in material processes of economic production (Apple, 1985). As a result, the design, development and content of textbooks are influenced by commercial considerations of economies of scale and market share. While many nation states centrally produce and distribute textbooks through government agencies, the production of textbooks has been increasingly dominated by multinational corporations with global publishing and media interests. Further there is evidence that textbook development and adoption policies in newly industrialised and postcolonial nation states is beginning to reflect corporate approaches and ideologies (Altbach & Kelly, 1988).
4. Textbooks and the Challenges of New Technologies
The technology of the printing press enabled the development of new and hybrid reading and writing practices and the production of the modern textbook. In postindustrial countries literacy now is being taught using electronic media, with extremely rapid cycles for the development and obsolescence of new technologies and products. These media range from "first wave" technologies like television, to computer-based interactive multimedia, and on-line communications that connect classrooms with each other and with virtual, authoritative sources of textual knowledge (Green & Bigum, 1996).
This new generation of software curricula includes commercially developed programs for teaching of spelling, addition and other specific skills, versions of reference and resource texts like encyclopedias, atlases, and others, and full textbook series designed to teach reading, mathematics and other curriculum areas. With CD-Rom storage, it is now possible to provide computerised access to an entire basal reading series. Additionally, children in networked classrooms are already on-line to the Internet, where they have access to an diverse and decentralised archive of texts of all genres and origins. As more classrooms in postindustrial countries and newly industrialising countries introduce computers, software and on-line electronic texts increasingly are complementing traditional print materials.
How these new texts are reshaping the teaching of literacy will require further study. Many of these new curriculum materials appear to be adaptations and extensions of the instructional form and ideological content of traditional basal readers. The best-selling educational software products in the US market are basal reading series for use in homes and schools. There is emergent criticism from educators that these new products uncritically replicate conventional print-based series, replete with graded readers, skill instruction and generic children's literature. At the same time, technological texts are being used in some classrooms as a means for generating new kinds of literacy events, for enhancing face-to-face talk and on-line communications amongst children of diverse cultural and social class backgrounds. In terms of the political economy of publishing, there is evidence of corporate consolidation in the development and marketing of software. Diversified technology corporations are attempting to capture educational markets by providing proprietary and restrictive packages of software materials, and they are attempting to regulate access to the Internet on a user-pays basis. In this regard, new media and technology firms appear to be taking their lead from those multinational publishers that have dominated textbook development in the last century.
Educators and schools face the challenges of establishing equity of access and of developing new conventions for textual authority and criticism. Significant disparities in access already have developed on the now traditional fault lines of geographic isolation, social class, cultural difference and gender. The danger here is that uneven access to electronic texts will reinforce longstanding patterns of discrimination against groups who still face marginalisation in terms of access to print literacy. For those students and teachers who are working on-line, the volume and spread of textbooks available in classrooms already has increased to unprecedented levels. On-line access to a virtual library of millions of texts will require the development of new critical literacies to evaluate, assess and critique the origins, authority and veracity of texts (Spender, 1996).
Whether and how new technologies will change reading and writing is, of course, the key issue confronting literacy studies and education (e.g., Landow & Delany, 1993). In the new workplaces and civic spheres of the next century computer technologies will require new "multiliteracies" and they will enable new opportunities for the teaching of literacy, including large-scale public pedagogies (New London Group, 1996). Yet the legacies of the primer and basal reader are intact. Print-based textbooks will retain a central, and highly profitable, role in literacy education in both postindustrial and postcolonial nation states. However, these new social, economic and technological conditions are already remaking the selective traditions of literacy education and, with them, the forms, contents and media of textbooks and text knowledge.
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