What's a textbook for?
I recently attended the bi-annual Teaching Classical Languages Symposium here in Sydney. I don't have a single post abut the TCLS overall, and so I'll say a bit about it here by way of introduction. TCLS has been running for 8 years now, I believe, and I've spoken at 4 of them (!). I unfortunately didn't hear about this year's iteration until the day before. Anyway, it brings together the classics community centred in Sydney, but also across Australia, and some international connections. A large proportion of participants are Latin teachers in a secondary setting, with then some tertiary educators, and oddballs like me.
This year's theme was "textbooks", and although I missed the first session, there were a lot of papers that only tangentially touched that theme anyway. But it got me thinking, which is always good. I have a lot of opinions on textbooks, and I also own a lot of them. But before I spout of opinions on textbooks, it behoves us to take a step back and ask what is a textbook for?
Language textbooks have a long and complicated history. Whether it’s the colloquia of the middle ages, of 15th century primers, there has long been an interest in compiling teaching materials into a more enduring, and transmissible form. For this post, I want to look at this through a few lenses. So, textbook as repository of declarative knowledge, textbook as teacher stand-in, textbook as input delivery system, textbook as toolbox, textbook as map.
Repository of declarative knowledge
I think the first way we tend to look at textbooks is that they are the things we store the knowledge in. Here's a book of knowledge, and it's going to tell you the stuff you are supposed to know, and you will take that knowledge out of the book, off the page, and into your head. This particularly reflects a world in which books were our data storage. Where else would you store information? A book is a convenient way of writing down all the things.
It's still very much the way we often think about textbooks. That the book has all the information, in an authoritative way, and you go to the book to get the knowledge.
Teacher stand-in
But there are other ways to think about textbooks, especially language textbooks. One of those is that a textbook stands in for a teacher. If language education is about some kind of transfer or led-experience, then a textbook does what a teacher cannot. For example when there is no teacher. Or when a teacher is not up to the task. Or when there is one teacher and many learners. In these and many more situations, the textbook is written in a way, or sometimes just used in such a way, that it mimics what a teacher would do. The textbook in this way of imagining it is the teaching agent.
Input delivery system
A different type of textbook is one where the textbook itself is giving lots of in-language content. This kind of textbook contains within itself lots of material that the learner is to read (or hear) as a means of learning the language. This can work in concert with the two previous ideas of the textbook, or stand alone. But the main feature of a textbook like this is quantity of target-language material for the learner to engage with.
Textbook as map
Another way we might think of a textbook is as a map. That is, it shows us the terrain of a subject, and where we might go and how we might get there. In language, that might be the explanatory presentation of grammar, which is a map of how the language is used. But it might also function as a map in other ways, charting a course of learning as a journey.
Textbook as toolbox
In a different vein, we might conceive of the textbook as a toolbox. Not as a rigid set of exercises, but as a varied set of deployable tools that do different jobs, solve different problems, and in language learning, move us along in various and complementary ways. A textbook like this offers variety and flexibility in solving problems.
Where to?
One of the things that I think considering textbooks under different conceptual models allows us to do, is to reconsider precisely (a) how we use textbooks that already exist, but also (b) what a textbook could be. And maybe there are other ways that we can think about textbooks! Would love to hear from you - are there other ways you think about (language) textbooks? Do you have a favourite textbook, for whatever reason? Things you love or loathe?
