Textbook Production in a Hybrid Age: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Producing Textbooks and Digital Educational Media

Abstract

There is no education without media. But what do we know about how educational media are made? Or how they shape the knowledge constructed in schools? These questions have been approached from various disciplines, using a range of methods. Individual researchers have, however, rarely looked across to see how other disciplines are engaging with these questions. Also, they have mainly focused on the ‘constraints’ limiting textbook publishing or ed-tech design. In this paper, we take an explicitly inter-disciplinary approach, and suggest a shift in perspective: By exploring the practices of publishers, authors and editors, as well as material-semiotic practices, research can shed new light on the contingencies of how ‘what counts as worth knowing’ is selected. This position paper thus provides an overview of current scholarship on four aspects of production practices (1. Authors and Authorship, 2. State and Interest Groups, 3. Political Economy and Business Models, 4. Technological and Media Change). We suggest two directions for future scholarship: First, we highlight the need for more international, comparative and praxis-orientated empirical research on textbook production and ed-tech design. Second, we propose that the debates on economic models be placed in their historical contexts and subjected to critical scrutiny. In order to use our research object itself (ed-tech) to open a dialogue across disciplines, we encourage readers to open the article in their browsers and comment on the paper using the non-profit hypothes.is annotation tool (https://hypothes.is/).