A new materialist turn toward the textbook: an exploration of the relationship between history textbooks and historical narratives

This study is concerned with history textbooks and historical narratives. Shifting attention away from the notion that the teacher uses the textbook as a mute classroom tool, this study follows Karen Barad’s new materialist theories to conceptualise the textbook as a lively, vibrant object with animate and agentive capacities. This study focuses on how one history textbook, G.R. Elton’s England Under the Tudors, shaped the historical narrative taught to history A-level students in the United Kingdom about the reign of Henry VIII. By offering three ekphrastic descriptions looking at first the textbook’s material qualities, second, its conditions of arrival, and its conditions of use, as framed by the leadership team of the school and the school building, and lastly, the textbook’s role as part of the (im)material assemblage of the history classroom, this study explores how these aspects of the textbook work together and contribute to the onto-epistemo-ological historical narrative. This study adopts an aesthetic orientation toward the object of study and methodological approach. The ekphrastic descriptions are accounts of the material experience of teaching history in a certain setting using the textbook as an object of focus. This study highlights the benefits of considering textbook practices as material and bodily practices. It illustrates the unique nature of the relationship of any teacher and the textbook(s) they use to teach. It stresses the impact a school’s architectural style, culture, chosen aesthetic, and ethos can have on the learning that takes place there. Finally, this study acknowledges the ontological dimension of history teaching, as well as the epistemological, and emphasises the importance of seeing the construction of historical narratives in classroom settings as something experienced and lived, rather than simply taught and then known.Education, Faculty ofCurriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department ofGraduat