Textbooks use images, in addition to text, for delivering knowledge, thereby convey attitudes and values of students including those on gender bias. The gender bias presented in textbook images affects in subtle ways the students' learning outcomes, career choices, and how they perceive science. However, prior research has relied on explicit…

This paper examines caste bias in Odia language textbooks prescribed by the Government in middle schools in the State of Odisha, India. The analysis focuses on 10 textbooks for Social Science and Odia literature prescribed for Classes IV to VIII. The framework proposed by Sadker and Zittleman (2007) to study gender bias in educational material in…

This study employs textbooks and legitimacy theories to examine the complexity of legitimizing China's textbook reform, planned since 2012, for three ideologically-laden subjects (Chinese language, History, and Morality and Law). Specifically, it explores why, to whom, and how China's Ministry of Education legitimized this textbook reform, which…

This study explores how Hong Kong's latest Chinese history curriculum hybridizes Romantic and Enlightened approaches and how that hybridization converges with/diverges from mainland China's, given the two societies' increased integration in the People's Republic of China. Data were drawn from Hong Kong's and mainland China's latest…

Formal schooling in the U.S. has a long and violent history towards Indigenous peoples, today morphing into exclusion and erasure. Using a novel longitudinal dataset of U.S. textbooks (n = 193) from California and Texas, published from 1850 to 2019, we seek to shine light on the issue through a comprehensive analysis of depictions of Indigenous…

This study draws on data collected from Chinese language textbooks to investigate the ways in which ethnic minority cultures and languages are represented in primary school textbooks in China. Drawing on the methods of thematic and comparative analysis, we specifically analyse how the representation of ethnic minorities in Chinese textbooks has…

Teaching and learning are grounded on age-appropriate, credible curricular resources, which can be formal (i.e. textbooks) and informal (i.e. trade-books). As Charles Darwin's ideas galvanized biology and racism, this study examined his historical representation within trade-books (e.g. biography, narrative non-fiction, expository, etc.),…

The history of subjects is often told analysing notions of knowledge in historical reforms, policies, curricula, and textbooks. In this article, we analyse student papers from 1968, focusing on their responses to the topic 'Social distinctions and prejudices in Denmark'. The students present a number of concepts and categories of social…

The Egyptian Christian (Coptic) minority's marginalization in politics and the Egyptian public sphere has been well investigated by several scholars. However, while many scholars and activists continue to call for the inclusion of the Coptic era in Egyptian history curricula, only very few studies have actually analyzed how that historical…

Despite decades of research to the contrary, public discourse continues to insist on the direct power of curriculum to shape student learning, rather than acknowledge the complex and situated ways that teachers and curricular materials interact to shape enacted instruction. In this paper, we use a model of curriculum enactment to illustrate the…

This paper investigates the portrayals of schools in various textbooks used by the focal children at an "anathashram" (orphanage) in suburban New Delhi, India. It draws on data collected in the course of ethnographic inquiry on the language and literacy socialization of focal boys over the past decade. The texts selected for this study…

In the early 1960s, researchers began to conduct content analyses of core reading programmes/basal readers. Although these researchers often adopted a critical perspective, and examined the ideological underpinnings of the texts, they failed to make an explicit connection between ideologies and reader access to the text. The study described here…

Despite a rich tradition of investigating how 'Oriental' and Middle Eastern colonized others are represented in Western and Eurocentric media, policy papers, curriculum and popular culture, an important issue that has not been adequately explored by scholars of Iranian studies is how Iranian curricula writers have constructed images of Western and…

This article reports an empirical study aiming to investigate students' use of mathematics textbooks in Shanghai and England, with a comparative perspective. The study used mixed methods to collect the data through student questionnaire, student focus group interview and classroom observation. 161 Shanghai seventh- and eighth-grade students and…

This study applies CDA and story grammar analysis to investigate how Chinese language textbooks for primary schools foster Chinese national identity through their depiction of Chinese people struggling against foreign invaders. The analysis was conducted on 12 textbooks and the findings were based on stories featuring a range of ages, from…