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2.3 Defining Textbooks
One important way official knowledge of school curriculum is communicated in classrooms
is through the use of textbooks. In discussing how official knowledge is constructed, Luke
raises the point of the influence and impact particular constructions have, and how this is
influenced by “…curriculum texts prepared by academics and teachers, and corporate
publishers…” (1995-1996, p. 28). Textbooks are written from the perspective that the content
contained within them is “what counts as knowledge…and, by default, alternative claims on
the same knowledge arena or alternative lines of exploration are cast as irrelevant” (Issitt,
2004, p. 689). Traditionally in Queensland textbooks have been written by school teachers,
Queensland-based academics (usually former classroom teachers, such as H.R. Cowie),
school and district inspectors, or compiled by anonymous Department of Education/Public
Instruction public servants (especially in the case of Queensland Readers). In more recent
times, there has been an increase in the education market of textbooks published by non-
Queensland authors. This is arguably a result of the increasing nationalisation of curriculum
that can be traced from about the mid-1990s onwards, with the advent of closer curriculum
ties between Australian states, through the 1989 Hobart Declaration of Schooling and the
updated 1999 Adelaide Declaration on National Goals of Schooling in the Twenty-first
Century (as detailed in Appendix A: Contexts). For the purposes of this project, the authorship
of textbooks remains with the former usual practices as the period of analysis ceases in 1988.
Additionally, textbooks published for Queensland schools closely follow the requirements of
each school year level as outlined in the relevant syllabus. For the Queensland context, how
the curriculum is realised through History textbooks including their publication is detailed in
greater depth in Chapter 4: Data Analysis Introduction.
Whilst there are many different ways to categorise and define exactly which types of written
academic texts should be catalogued as textbooks, as explored by Issitt (2004), for the
purposes of this dissertation, undertaking such a task is irrelevant. Instead, the textbooks
selected for analysis are those that are marketed as being textbooks by publishing companies,
such as Jacaranda and William Brooks, and those published by relevant Queensland
government departments, The Department of Public Instruction later to become The
Department of Education. They are automatically considered textbooks due to the purpose of
their publication (selection criteria for specific textbooks used for analysis is outlined in
Chapter 3: Methodology, Research Design and Conduct). It is, however useful to look at the
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