Textbooks as mediators in the intellectual project of history education

D.Phil.History education is part of the intellectual project of high school education and its textbooks matter in terms of their educational brief. History textbooks have a significant role to play, especially in South African classrooms where many teachers have no access to any other media or subject knowledge. Moreover, textbooks represent a sample of a body of knowledge, which can be understood to pass on a sociocultural inheritance, encoded in language and images, as they record the education system's epistemological position in a 'slice in time' with the prevailing mindset in it. This mindset is partly captured in the curriculum, which can be interpreted to affirm that controlling the present and shaping the future rely to some extent on controlling the manner in which the past is presented. The study aims to find out how texts construct or encode this mindset, and how the strategy of their constructors can be recognised or decoded. This aim is realised through exploring a particular topic, namely that of theories of race and racism and their impact, in a set of 10 officially approved grade 11 history textbooks and their teacher guides. To fit the aim of this study, sociocultural theory was deemed as appropriate for the overall lens informing the methods of text analysis and the discussion of the findings. From such a theoretical perspective, instruction and accompanying semiotic tools are considered to be a major avenue for mediating students' /pupils' motives, cognition, and their social development, and hence textbooks, as instructional media, can be regarded as important mediating tools. To investigate this dynamic I pose two research questions: Firstly, how can an interdisciplinary approach to textual analysis be utilised to construct a model for textbook analysis? This question arises from a lack of theoretical, epistemological and ontological considerations of textbook research and addresses a gap in the literature. The second question is, how can such a model be demonstrated 'in action' to analyse one theme in a series of 10 grade 11 history textbooks? Given the historical theme of the impact of 19th century race theories leading to genocide, this research has a humanistic interest in the subject matter and this, in turn, defined the bounded case of this inquiry. The methods are my own hybrid of hermeneutic analysis, discourse analysis, visual analysis, question (pedagogic) analysis, critical analysis, and semiotic analysis. These are all interpretive methods, which are suitable for an inquiry into meaning-making. To realise the aim of constructing an interdisciplinary model for text analysis, I devised five categories or dimensions, namely "making own historical knowledge", "learning empathy", "positioning a textual community", "fashioning stories", and "orientating the reader". These five dimensions are explained in detail, both their deduction from theory and their induction into the research process. These dimensions, once stabilised, had become heuristic devices that guided not only the way I looked for 'answers' to the research questions, but also the overall structure of the thesis