Palgrave Studies in Educational Media

This open access book investigates how representation of Native Americans and Mexican-origin im/migrants takes place in high school history textbooks. Manually analyzing text and images in United States textbooks from the 1950s to 2022, the book documents stories of White victory and domination over Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) groups that disproportionately fill educational curricula. While representation and accurate information of non-White perspectives improves over time, the same limited tropes tend to be recycled from one textbook to the next. Textual analysis is augmented by focus groups and interviews with BIPOC students in California high schools. Together, the data show how misrepresentation and absence of BIPOC perspectives in textbooks impact youth identity. This book argues for an innovative rethinking of US history curricula to consider which stories are told, and which perspectives are represented.

 This book presents the findings of three studies on the use of diagrams in civic education. The first study presents an international comparison of textbook diagrams promoting national unity in diversity, with examples from ten countries. The second focuses on the depiction of migration in diagrammatic form in German textbooks, The final study was conducted in collaboration with teachers in Swedish social science classrooms, and focuses on teaching comprehension of flow charts and scatterplots. The book will be of interest to scholars of educational media, didactics, the history of education and citizenship education.