ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an illustrative example of a critical discourse studies approach to textbooks and explores how a high school social studies textbook addresses its student-readers. It suggests that critique may be returning to education through an unexpected back door: the economic rationality of competence-discourse. The chapter discusses the mainstay of textbook studies has long been content analyses, critiquing particular textbooks for inaccuracies and omissions, or more broadly critiquing the ideology of textbook narratives. It explains pedagogical research across the school subjects has investigated the extent to which textbook design helps or hinders teaching and learning processes. The chapter describes practical orientation has been the work of revising textbooks in collaborative, often highly politically charged, contexts, example, the German-Israeli Textbook Commission which gives recommendations to Germany and Israel on appropriate textbook representations. It explores emerging work engages with the history and theory of the material artefact of the 'textbook', exploring the contours of this very specific and ever-changing 'medium'.
