Description
Michael Apple's scholarship on curriculum, educational ideology, and official knowledge continues to be influential to the study of schooling. Drawing on the sociological insights of Pierre Bourdieu and the cultural studies approaches of Raymond Williams, Apple articulates a theory of

Michael Apple's scholarship on curriculum, educational ideology, and official knowledge continues to be influential to the study of schooling. Drawing on the sociological insights of Pierre Bourdieu and the cultural studies approaches of Raymond Williams, Apple articulates a theory of schooling that pays particular attention to how official knowledge is incorporated into the processes of schooling, including textbooks. In an effort to contribute to Apple's scholarship on textbooks, this study analyzed high school American history textbooks from the 1960s through the 2000s with specific attention to the urban riots of the late-1960s, sixties counterculture, and the women's movement utilizing Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic concept of abjection to augment Apple's theory of knowledge incorporation. This combination reveals not only how select knowledge is incorporated as official knowledge, but also how knowledge is treated as abject, as unfit for the curricular body of official knowledge and the selective tradition of American history. To bridge the theoretical frameworks of incorporation and abjection Raymond Williams' theory of structures of feeling and Slavoj iek's theory of ideological quilting are employed to show how feelings and emotional investments maintain ideologies. The theoretical framework developed and the interpretive analyses undertaken demonstrate how textbook depictions of these historical events structure students' present educational experiences with race, class, and gender.
Reuse Permissions
  • Downloads
    pdf (560.1 KB)

    Details

    Title
    • Textbooks in transition: the incorporation and abjection of race, class and gender in high school American history textbooks, 1960s-2000s
    Contributors
    Date Created
    2011
    Resource Type
  • Text
  • Collections this item is in
    Note
    • Partial requirement for: M.A., Arizona State University, 2011
      Note type
      thesis
    • Includes bibliographical references (p. 131-138)
      Note type
      bibliography
    • Field of study: Educational leadership and policy studies

    Citation and reuse

    Statement of Responsibility

    by Benjamin Kearl

    Machine-readable links