Textbook

Textbook

A textbook is a kind of document, which provides a systematic introduction to the fundamental principles or content of a subject intended for teaching a given target group.

According to Kuhn (1962/1970) is the role of textbooks in scientific education a fundamental one. Textbooks not only make the very scientific revolutions invisible (to students and lay people), but they are also used as pedagogic instruments to form new scientists in agreement with the present paradigm. It is in textbooks that exemplars are described. It is this knowledge that ought to lead the neophyte to become also someone able to solve problems.

"Ludwik Fleck (1935) argues that textbooks present a different sort of fact from journal articles, a mosaic of claims from which the personal and provisional have been removed and in which the pattem of the whole is constructed. The physicist John Ziman (1984) is one of a number of science studies researchers who would see textbooks, along with encyclopaedia articles and university lectures, as the conclusion of a process of accreditation. This approach suggests that text analysts should contrast textbooks with other scientific genres, such as joumal articles or popularizations." (Myers, 1991).

Literature:

Brooke, J. H. (1998). Textbooks and the history of science. Paradigm, No. 25. Available: http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/faculty/westbury/paradigm/brooke.html

Børre Johnsen, E. (1993). Textbooks in the Kaleidoscope. A Critical Survey of Literature and Research on Educational Texts. Translated from Norwegian by Linda Sivesind. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.

Encyclopedia Britannica, London c1964, Vol. 21, Sordello to Textbooks, pp. 984-985.

Fleck, L. (1935) The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. Thaddeus Trenn (1979). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kuhn, T. S. (1962/1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (1st edition 1962).

Myers, G. (1991). Textbooks and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. Paradigm (October, 1991, No. 6). Available at: http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/westbury/Paradigm/myers2.htm

Ziman, J. (1984) An Introduction to Science Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.