A Critical Approach to History Textbook Images

Introduction

In South Africa, textbooks are reinforced as critical learning and teaching resources by the Department of Basic Education’s (2021) Revised Annual Teaching Plans for Social Sciences (p. 1). Those selected for use in a classroom must be CAPS ¹ compliant and listed on the Learning and Teaching Support Material (Kwazulu-Natal Department of Education, 2014), a department textbook catalogue. The pedagogical approach is to teach history by the rigorous process of historical inquiry involving the specific aims and skills, bringing together text, visuals and any other material that can tell the past (Department of Basic Education, 2011, p. 8).Bertram (2012) argues that in the field of History Education, two strands of knowledge, specialized substantive knowledge and specialized procedures are integral for developing historical thinking. Substantive history knowledge includes knowledge of key concepts and periods that make up the content of history. In contrast, procedural knowledge is the organizing ideas that structure events in history (Ashby & Lee, 2000). These second-order concepts include establishing historical significance, using primary source evidence, identifying continuity and change, analyzing cause and consequence, taking historical perspectives and understanding the moral dimension of historical interpretation (Seixas, 2006).

Bertram (2012) argued that these two strands of knowledge can come apart when the practice is recontextualized to the school classroom. Textbooks are one way in which this can happen as the writers vary the degree of specialization of both types of knowledge. Figure 1 shows the Esoteric, Public, Descriptive and Expressive Domains and the specific criteria (content, language and procedures) for each.

Research

I used Bertram’s (2012) process of ‘institutionalization’ to locate into domains the images and supporting information from seven history textbooks, one per grade, one chapter per book, spanning three phases of the Foundation, Intermediate and Secondary phases in the South African history curriculum. These books were purposively sampled as they are the popular choice at the school I teach and several others in the district. Photographs, pictures, drawings or portraits, captions and supporting information as well as what learners were required to do with the images, were coded as substantive or procedural knowledge. For example, if an image was historical in content, was supported by historical language, and was accompanied by historical procedures as it required specialized ways of working with it—was coded within the Esoteric Domain.

Findings

Table 1, below, shows the number of images across the seven textbooks and where they placed in each domain.

Ideally, images should be located in the Esoteric Domain, where conditions for the content, language and procedures related to the image are specialized to history. However, in this study there are a greater concentration of images in the Expressive Domain, particularly in the higher grades suggesting that learners engage in more generic ways rather than using specialized historical procedures. The generic use of images can be attributed to the general lack of provenance with the images.Havekes, Coppen, Boxtel, and Imants (2009, January 14-16) identifies provenance as the details of the date and author of the source and the process of corroboration.

Some images in the textbooks are labeled as sources while others are not. There is no distinction between a generic drawing of an idea of the past and a primary or secondary source. If such a textbook is used alone, the images will contribute little to support historical understanding. I found images without sufficient supporting information or captioning.

There were no photographs at certain points in history, so drawings qualify as secondary sources of information and not evidence. Pictures drawn by textbook artists to create something out of the past are generic sources of information. For example, the colonization of the Cape in the 18^th century was a time that could only be captured from old books (such as drawings, paintings) and, documents (such as journals, letters, diaries), and oral sources (people who lived at the time and who spoke to others who recorded their experiences). There are not many primary sources that are still available for historical reconstruction. It is not acceptable to argue that the past did not exist because there are no primary sources of certain events. For this reason, a drawing is presented of the early Cape Town harbor (Grade 7 in the Senior Phase) so learners can use their present knowledge of the developed harbor to “imagine” and understand how it transitioned, scaffolding ideas of change and continuity and cause and effect. Teachers will have to justify the drawing if it is critiqued as unreliable by learners.

While generic procedural knowledge is foregrounded in the higher grades, the lower grades of 3 and 5 (Foundation and Intermediate Phases) have higher placements in the Esoteric Domain, indicating greater engagement with images using specialized or historical procedures. This can be attributed to the type of history taught in the formative years, which is far more localized and simplified.

Higher grades in the Senior Phase have more complex concepts and more significant events over larger spaces in the world which is a challenge to capture in image formats. History in the higher grades deals with areas and countries far removed from the learner’s locality, showing a decontextualization of knowledge. This is difficult to capture in text and complex to teach. The Grade 8 (Senior Phase) textbook presents a greater number of images that are historical in content. They are black and white and show real people, buildings, and surroundings allowing learners to access past reality. More recent photographs show more modern, effective ways to capture and present events. But these images lack proper provenance. Learners require as evidence the time period of construction, captions about the year, by whom it was taken, and for what purpose. This information helps construct historical accounts.

Practical Guidance for Teachers

I would recommend that teachers of history understand knowledge classification within “The Domains of Practice for School History” (Bertram, 2012) and consciously create opportunities for learners to approach images with a critical lens to master history content and specialized historical procedures. If images and information are in the public domain, teachers can adjust methodologies to create links to the Esoteric Domain. Not all images can be exclusively located in the ‘Esoteric Domain’ and not all primary sources are properly contextualized so teachers can acquire alternative sources properly contextualized to help learners construct narratives.

The teacher can decide if it is more appropriate to focus on substantive knowledge than procedural knowledge. Learners cannot be engaged in the critical process of source analysis when there are incomplete sources and those without a context, learners. Judgments cannot be reasoned.

If images or pictures are more than aesthetic ‘ornaments’ worn by pages, then they should be ‘mined’ at deeper levels for integral historical evidence. The ‘mining’ involves this critical approach towards imagery or any source material in the text. The teacher has to explain the context of the image and scaffold the background if images are not appropriately captioned. Teachers may not have to do this for every image, but they need to step in if learners believe what they see constitutes evidence. If a textbook is used solely by the learner, then there is little that a teacher can do apart from teaching learners how to develop a critical approach to images.

Q & A with Pranitha Bharath

Question # 4:

Teacher's Question:

How might the history teacher use the domain concepts like Esoteric and Expressive Domains to increase learner engagement with visual images.

Pranitha Bharath’s Response:

The best way to demonstrate the utility of Bertram’s tool is to show an image in the Expressive Domain and how a teacher can consciously move it over to the Esoteric Domain. The history teacher would analyse Figure 2 and its supporting information using the specific criteria of the tool and locate the image in one of the four domains.

The image is located in the Expressive Domain because it has historical content— the theme of slavery. The substantive knowledge content is seen in its caption. The ‘slave-master’ concept emanating from the picture’s caption points to its substantive historical content. At the same time, the procedures learners engage with are generic. In the supporting activity, the learner is asked to tell their partner what they notice about the image. This is general extraction of data from observation. The drawing is labelled as a ‘source’ but is a source of information. If teachers locate the image in the Expressive Domain, they must adjust teaching to lead learners to conclude that this is not a primary source. This is not evidence. The teacher can task the learners with an activity that develops skills specialised to history. The learner activity should be about the imbalance of power between the two people in the picture, calling for critique and understanding of the historical context. This entails important substantive and procedural knowledge, which would propel the learning into the Esoteric Domain. Learners would acquire a narrative about slavery instead of responding to general observations of people in the picture. Teachers would identify this image as an instructional image with a rich source of information but it is not historical evidence. The drawing captures an event in time and space with an intent for visual learning. Learners construct deeper historical understandings if they wrestle with the nature of evidence, which is absent in this case.