If you visit different classrooms, you probably notice that most of the teachers use a standard textbook. The reasons for this are many, depending on the design of the curriculum, the directives of the political administration, the level of competence on the part of teachers…etc. Textbooks can provide several advantages in the classroom: they could be helpful for beginning teachers and could provide organized units of work; a textbook gives plans and lessons; everything is spelled out. As good as they may appear on the surface, textbooks do have some limitations.
Usually textbooks fail to stimulate student interest. It is not unusual to refuse textbooks because they are large collections of data, for large amounts of students. Scholars may find it difficult to understand the relevance of so much useless information to their day-to-day lives. The textbook is usually designed as the one and only source of information, but can become outdated in just a few years (thanks to the national administrations, mainly). They are expensive, easily damaged, heavy and uncomfortable to carry around…. Textbooks are a hot topic every few years: with the entry of a new government, usually a renewal of education plans happens, and textbooks are replaced by law (juicy business for the big publishers!!). This is a huge economic burden for families, who have no reasonable alternative: buying textbooks is compulsory.
Textbook is the way of teaching most common today. A classic resource that has been considered essential in the classrooms. In this mode of teaching, the professor's role is to lecture on information obtained from a teacher book. This "comfort" provided by the textbooks is, maybe, the reason why nowadays, textbook is the most common widely used resource in schools all over the world.
In this activity, we tried to expose the main disadvantages of the use of textbooks as basic resources in classrooms, and it was carried out by a very original format of presentation: An Infographic.
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| The final outcome. |
To organize the activity, the Facilitators of the week, Mariano and Irene, divided the group to look for information individually, because in that way we could get more resources than doing that in peers or with the whole group. Then, we also divided the articles with information about Textbooks that were uploaded to virtual classroom by the teacher. Each person had to read only an article and not all of them, summarize it and if the information was in Spanish, this person had to translate it into English.
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| Here, the whole group meeting and working in the contents of the Infographic. |
After this process, when we had got the whole information, each person had to explain it to our group. And all together we started to do the infographic which was one of the options that we had for doing this project.
Nevertheless, the main reason why we decided to do an Infographic is because we thought that is a powerful visual format that involves great creativity and is strongly related to ICTs.
Besides, the use of this scheme entails a lot of benefits, because 90% of information that comes to the brain is visual, and 40% of people will respond better to visual information than plan text.
To create a original design, we made the infographic in a special way, using a pop culture icon; one of the most famous album covers of Pink Floyd, "The Dark Side of the Moon".
You can appreciate the similarity between them:
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| All the data we used for the graphics was collected from ANELE (Asociación Nacional de Editores de Libros y Material de Enseñanza). |
In the infographic, we put all the disadvantages commonly known classified in fields:
- Economical (The most obvious problem is the expenditure for the families)
- Ideological (Most of the best known editorials are owned by the Catholic Church, and normally goes according to the political party that governs in that moment)
- Educational (Some practices of teaching/learning which imposes the use of textbooks are very outdated and systematical)
- Epistemological (Textbook don't offer the opportunity to create knowledge, therefore, does not contribute to develop the real knowledge that a child must have)
- De-professionalization (The editorials are who really decide learning on the children, so teachers don't choose the contents that transmit to their pupils)
According to the role of translator, the five terms chosen related to the work of this week were the following:
1. According to Encyclopedia of Education, 2008b, "A textbook is a printed and bound artefact for each year or course of study. They contain facts and ideas around a certain subject". Today, we can find it in an electronic format, called eBooks (electronic books). The teaching-learning process is largely determined by the use of books, fact that limited the children´s knowledge, creativity, authonomy.
2. According to Wikipedia, an Information graphics or infographics are “graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly”. It implies a lot of creativity and is profoundly related to ICTs. It is composed of different graphics, different colors, images, special designs.. Therefore, it gets a lot of attention. Thanks to be a visual representation, people´s brain will understand and capture this information in a clearer way.
3. Teaching de-professionalization is a process through which a teacher loses skills, autonomy, competence and creativity in the educational field. It leads to a didactic immobility. According to David Hargreaves, “Progressive de-professionalization: a learning society where everyone teaches and learns and no one is an expert.”
4. According to WordReference, an Editorial is a “Company that is dedicated to the edition”. Besides, the publication and the distribution of writings are other of its responsibilities. Currently, the majority of the editorials in Spain belong to the Catholic Church, which causes an ideological content in the books.
5. Epistemology is the study of the knowledge, the only source of truth. According to Meanings,"Epistemology studies the origin, structure, methods and validity of knowledge". In that way, the books limited children´s knowledge because teachers present these manuals as the truest source. Therefore, children do not search other sources or information: they are based roundly on the books.
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| One of the many visual tests. |
Analyzing the Dark Side of Textbooks practice:
The best part of the activity was the design of the infographic and the search for information to fill it, and the very best moment was when we found a concept that could easily be used and was pretty original, as is using the cover of the album "The Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd. Obviously, the infographic can lose its strength if you are not learned about this cover, which is a cultural icon of our society like, e.g. the “Abbey Road” cover from The Beatles or the Campbell's soup cans pictures from Andy Warhol.
The problems were the usual (which we also have in other subjects). As we are a large number of people is difficult to accommodate the schedules and preferences for work in group. And sometimes there are disagreements about how to perform the work or the role of each member. So one thing we need to constantly improve for the next weeks is integration and teamwork. To do a good presentation, it is important to create a solid group of work; it is also important that the components interact each other to express their own opinions; we have to have the aim object of the practice clear and we have to know how to deal all the problems that could appear in that kind of works.
Also, we should keep our originality and imagination when it comes to homework and not get carried away by the "easy way" when to perform it, even if it means we go the extra mile.
Also, we should keep our originality and imagination when it comes to homework and not get carried away by the "easy way" when to perform it, even if it means we go the extra mile.
This topic is related with almost all of the subjects in this course and degree. As textbooks doesn't take students' background knowledge into account, teachers does not adapt lessons to the interests and capacities of students. Psychology, sociology, scholar organization and ITCs…etc. are necessary for us to be able to get an optimal environment for teaching/learning without blindy following a textbook. We must be able to create our own personal textbooks, but mainly in our minds, with our knowledge, tailored to each situation.
In conclusion, we have learnt that textbooks (and any of its alternatives such as websites, digital encyclopaedias, and so on) are only as good as the educator who uses it: is just one tool, and perhaps a very relevant one. Sometimes, teachers over-rely on textbooks and don't consider other resources for their classroom. The teacher should not become a mere reader of knowledge written by others. No textbook is perfect, but it is one powerful resource for you to use wisely as a guidebook, or like a "storyboard". The teacher should not become a mere reader of knowledge written by others.Even a bad example can become something we learn a lesson from. As future teachers, we'll need to make many decisions, and one of those is if and how we want to use the textbook.
Irene Martínez
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Mariano Castillo
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Ana De Lara
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MªJosé Herrero
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Javier Marín
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Natalia Martínez
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Alicia
Lova
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Irene
Martínez
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9
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9
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9
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3
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9
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9
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9
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Mariano Castillo
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9
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9
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8
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7
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10
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8
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10
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Ana De Lara
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9
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9
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8
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6
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10
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8
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10
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Mª José Herrero
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8
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9
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9
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8
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9
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9
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9
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Javier Marín
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8
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8
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8
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9
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7
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8
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9
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Natalia Martínez
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8
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9
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9
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5
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10
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8
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10
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Alicia Lova
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9
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9
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9
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9
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9
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9
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9
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Mark for this Activity.
What is your perception of the group work on this activity?
- Despite the fact that we think that this is one of our best works of the subject, we consider that the organization and the group cooperation was still not perfect. That is the reason why we emphasize the fact that we need to contienue improving our team work, making a joint effort to avoid the individual overload. But in the end everything went well and the job turned out to be an original and high quality one.
