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o Queensland based authors are often teachers or teacher-educators, therefore
are more likely to be used by Queensland schools as the content is localised
and the authors are known.
• Textbook published in Queensland (Y/N);
o As in ‘Publisher and Location’ category, those textbooks published by
Queensland based publishers are more likely to have been used extensively by
Queensland schools, particularly as education in Australia is state based. In the
early 20 th century, it was not unusual for textbooks used in Queensland
schools to be published in the UK, often for a UK audience but incorporated in
Queensland schooling due to a lack of locally produced textbooks. The 1913
School Reader (distributed for use in 1915) was the first textbook published
for Queensland schools.
• Evidence of use in Queensland schools; and
o Evidence can be found by way of school stamps, store stamps, student names
and classes handwritten on the inside cover, margin notes made throughout the
textbook, library borrowing cards, colouring-in of pictures and pictures cut out
of pages. Evidence of use is important to establish so that a case can be made
that the textbook was used.
• Likelihood of being used by students in a ‘class-set’ type arrangement.
o Textbooks that were massed produced by the Department of Education (prior
to the 1970s) were generally used as class sets; whereby each student in each
school year was given a copy of a textbook for their year level, used it for the
year and then returned it at the end of the year, to be passed to the next group
of students moving to that year level. In some cases, the students purchased
the textbooks and these have remained on family bookshelves, used by
younger siblings. This is evidenced by some books having multiple names
written in the inside cover, all with the same family name.
The establishment of this annotated bibliography makes explicit the texts selected are typical
texts. Meyer reports that often in research “...there is little discussion about statistical or
theoretical representativeness of the material analysed” (2001, p. 25). Therefore, categorising
the textbooks in this bibliography enables an evidence-based selection process to occur, an
approach that Cullip (2006) adopts in his research on Malaysian History textbooks.
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