BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    Between training and popularization: regulating science textbooks in secondary education

    Shapiro, Adam R. (2012) Between training and popularization: regulating science textbooks in secondary education. Isis 103 (1), pp. 99-110. ISSN 0021-1753.

    Full text not available from this repository.

    Abstract

    Recruitment into the scientific community is one oft-stated goal of science education—in the post-Sputnik United States, for example—but this obscures the fact that science textbooks are often read by people who will never be scientists. It cannot be presupposed that science textbooks for younger audiences, students in primary and secondary schools, function in this way. For this reason, precollegiate-level science textbooks are sometimes discussed as a subset of literature popularizing science. The high school science classroom and the textbook are forums for exposing the public to science. The role of governments and educational institutions in regulating the consumption of these texts not only determines which books are used; it influences how they are written, read, and deemed authoritative. Therefore such science textbooks should not be seen as (at best) the disjunction of texts-for-training and books-for-popularization. A changing sense of what “textbooks” are compels a different understanding of their use in the history of science.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 22 May 2013 10:21
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:04
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/6959

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    0Downloads
    6 month trend
    190Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item Edit/View Item