WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
I was going to include this as part of my Fortnightly Links, but it’s too big an issue to deal with in such a cursory way. Wesley Fryer stirred things up a bit recently in a post entitled A call for a textbook purchasing moratorium. As suggested by the title, Wes thinks that it’s time for schools to stop buying textbooks. Is this a good idea? Here’s my thoughts… 
Here’s the reasons Wes puts forward in his post:
- Textbooks are expensive (”up to $100 each”)
- “The era of the digital curriculum has dawned.”
- A textbook moratorium guides schools towards 1:1 laptop initiatives.
- Textbooks do not allow students to create content.
- Stopping buying textbooks does not mean the end of libraries/research facilities - “we need to give students in our schools MORE access to MORE diverse texts, to encourage as much READING as we can.”
- Free curriculum materials are available.
- 99% of schools in the USA are “wired”.
- Other things which are hampering progress (”seat time”, “bell schedules”) are tied into the textbook-buying/using culture.
- Purchasing textbooks is not “fiscally responsible”.
I can only give my (UK-based) point of view on this. That means I can’t comment on concepts that are alien to me such as “seat time” and textbooks costing up to the equivalent of £50 each. I can, however, comment on the rest. Just for the record and before I air my opinions, Stephen Downes is for the idea of a moratorium (”wasteful and expensive and isn’t preparing children for the future”) whereas Vicki Davis is against it (”a digital only classroom at this time is as untenable as a paper-only classroom”). Karyn Romeis talks about her great love of books but, I think, confuses novel-reading with textbooks somewhat. The two are chalk and cheese: you won’t catch me with a copy of a GCSE textbook before I nod off to sleep at night! 
(she does however, make some valid points about the textbook issue being a 1st-world problem)
Never being one to shirk controversy, let’s stir things up a little further and compare the textbook situation to gun laws in the USA and UK. In America, as far as I understand it, to own a handgun is legal. In the UK it is not. More people die in the USA from shootings than they do in the UK. This leads to broadly two camps of opinion:
- Guns are made for one purpose which is to shoot bullets. As bullets kill people it is likely that there will be an increase in fatal shootings if more people own firearms.
- Inanimate objects do not cause people to do things. “Guns don’t kill people; people do.”
Analogously, then, there are two broad camps when it comes to textbooks:
- Textbooks are made for a dominant method of instruction. If they are purchased it is more likely that they will be used for that purpose.
- The use of textbooks depends upon the teacher - i.e. upon the underlying pedagogy.
Wes Fryer seems to subscribe to the first of these views - that textbooks somehow cause methods of instruction. Aristotle would laugh at him: it makes no sense to say that inanimate objects can cause animate things (such as humans) to act in a particular way. I would lean towards the latter view, but reject both Wes and Aristotle’s conclusions. That is to say that textbooks can be used in a variety of creative and useful ways; nevertheless they do have a symbolic nature which can psychologically influence teachers.
I use textbooks. I tried not to when I first started teaching, but I just burned myself out. It’s the difference between the following. Yes skills are more important than content, but the former can’t be taught in abstraction. And, as a teacher, I can’t be expected to create the amount of content I need for 23 periods of 50 minutes per week. It’s the difference between:
Going back to the points listed earlier that Wes made, I think a few are fallacious. First of all, it is simply not true to assume that paper-based textbooks mean that students don’t create content. It depends upon the pedagogy which informs the ecology or habitat in which the textbooks are used. It’s fair enough to say that if textbooks are being used to prop-up a transmission model of education, but not if they’re being used selectively, intelligently and in conjunction with other resources.
Second, textbooks - if they are as pernicious as Wes considers them to be - are merely a symptom of the underlying problem in education. They are not a cause of it. To lump textbook purchasing with other problems with education is not clear-headed and not helpful when trying to change education for the 21st-century.
Third, textbooks provide coherent and rigorously-checked resources relevant to the courses followed in schools. Digital curricula and resources, can be a mixed blessing: they can lead to a much less-cohesive approach where content is covered but skills not learned. I’ll admit that I’m currently doing some work for Folens publishers (digital resources, however). But not all skills that are needed in the 21st century, after all, involve looking at glowing screen… 
The trouble is, however, that it’s a vicious circle. In order for the situation to obtain where textbooks are no longer needed, investment has to be made on an administrative/leadership level in terms of purchasing and strategy. However, the stimulus for this can’t come without pressure from teachers. But how can teachers know anything different from what they’re used to unless they’re aware and have used the alternatives? Perhaps that is where Wes’ rallying cry comes in… 
Popularity: 6% [?]
Thanks for the link, Doug. I can assure you I don’t confuse reading novels with text books but
I was the sort of kid who did read my text books… if I was interested enough in the subject - I still do, only the things that qualify as text books for postgrad degrees perhaps escape the definition (although I don’t see why) and 
the text books for language courses include novels, poetry and plays (or they did when I was in high school), so the line between reading for leisure and reading for study is perhaps less clear cut than is sometimes indicated.
Interesting what happened to my bracketed a and b in the comment above… Freudian?
Interesting post.
Although I agree with several of your key points, I think you have missed an important middle path. It is possible to support teachers with a mix of existing Dead Tree Editionn resources, and existing digital content…if teachers and students build curriculum resources as both process and product.
Most districts stopped buying new textbooks, and used the exiting ones as resources WHILE teachers and students collaboratively created relevant support materials.
The idea of textbooks being rigorously vetted is not consistent with my experience, but maybe you’ve had a better success rate. I’ve found them to be pretty underwhelming in both quality and rigor.
Anyway, I enjoyed your post. I have several posts related to these issues, including one entitled “Is There Room in for Web 2.0 Content in the Typical Classroom”:
http://teachers4schools.com/open/?p=11
Our district is attempting just such a blending, by the way, and although we have a long way to go, we are up to over 6,500 pages of curriculum content, resources and guides created by teachers and students:
http://wiki.bssd.org/
Keep up the nice blog. I wish I had more time to read and post!
Regards,
JTC…in the Bering Sea
My position is more like that described by John Concilus than in your post.
You write,
> And, as a teacher, I can’t be expected to create the amount of content I need for 23 periods of 50 minutes per week.
I would never expect teachers to create that much content per week. This is not what I was suggesting at all. Neither, I suspect, is it what Wes Fryer had in mind.
As John points out, there are thousands of pages of curriculum content already online and it would not be unreasonable to - at the very least - replicate existing textbook content online.
This means that teachers can use basically the *same* content online as they use now, but without the needless expense of purchasing textbooks.
Of course, as your post suggests, their use *would* change over time, because the use of an editable electronic medium enables a different style of teaching. But at no point would the new types of uses devolve into the sweatshop content-production labour you describe.
I agree with much of your analysis of Wes’s article, however, as John points out, I think you place too much trust in textbook publishers. There is enough documentation of textbook errors that go uncorrected and undetected to be wary of them.
Couple of links here…
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/1030/6612178a_print.html
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/11/03/badbooks/
Textbooks are a “solution” sold to schools to solve the “problem” that teachers don’t have enough time or skill to create their own content, and that this self-created content will not be consistent. Although some teachers bring in alternate sources, or encourage students to question any statement of fact (including the teacher’s), these teachers are few and far between.
Students widely understand that the textbook is the curriculum. Ask most students what they are doing in any class and the answer will likely be “Chapter 11.”
Use of online content is only an iimprovement over textbooks if teachers teach students to question it and encourage them to find alternate, supporting sources. That rarely happens now, so it’s unlikely that will change.
An interesting piece, Doug. I have become less and less dependent on using textbooks, and I use the word ‘dependent’ deliberately as that is my main concern with them. As a Head of Department who has worked with a range of teachers with varying degrees of subject knowledge, I would prefer it if teachers did not use textbooks. I had one teacher who was totally dependent on the (very poor quality) textbook that he chose to use, and despite numerous attempts by myself to wean him off by supplying him with much better resources, he was basically too lazy to do anything other than ‘turn to page 54 and answer questions 1-100′! I have always been someone who has created their own resources for a number of reasons; it is one of the most creative aspects of the job, sometimes there is nothing more satisfying than producing a good, high quality worksheet (sad I know); by using a textbook you cannot differentiate effectively for your students, in fact you are seriously neglecting your students if you do not produce material that is suitable for them. I don’t mean individual worksheets for every class obviously, but I know that when I design material I have a few students in my head which allows me to pitch the work effectively; textbooks often have the most dreary, uninspiring activities which are pitched far too low - how many questions are closed, knowledge and understanding types?
Thanks to all of your for the considered replies.
@Karyn: You’re right in saying that ‘textbook’ is a shorthand word for ‘pre-prepared resources by someone else’. What we mean is stimulus material: we shouldn’t be getting it all from one place and be plodding through someone else’s resources which are customised and differentiated for, effectively, no-one…
@John: Thanks very much for the links. The middle path is pretty much exactly what I do: use textbooks where they’re useful, create my own content, and create a ‘digital habitat’ which envelops the ‘physical habitat’. Hence Google Apps this year to sit alongside learning.mrbelshaw.co.uk and my GCSE students’ Wordpress MU-powered blogs.
@Stephen: Absolutely, but the decision to do so has to come from ‘on high’. Where’s the stimulus for schools to change to such a system?
@Sylvia: I think the textbook situation differs depending on where you are in the world. Am I correct in thinking some school boards in the US/Canada dictate which textbooks to use across the region? That’s certainly not the case in the UK, which means there’s competition for decent resources. So what I’m saying is the situation is perhaps not so bad over here!
@Dan: There’s nothing inherently wrong with using a textbook - it depends upon how you use it. To plod through the textbook unthinkingly is absolutely wrong; I don’t think anyone reading this would say otherwise. However, as Vicki Davis says (in the quotation in the post), a completely digital curriculum is just as wrong as a completely paper-based version.