Personal Details: Macgilchrist, Felicitas
Author
Felicitas Macgilchrist, PhD, is Head of the Media|Transformation department at the Georg Eckert Institute of International Textbook Studies, Braunschweig, and Professor of Media Research at the University of Goettingen's Institute for Educational Science. Her current research focuses on the discourses and practices around educational technology, including critical and speculative approaches to digital education. Her projects ask which policies and practices are shaping media change in today's schools, with a specific focus on inequality.
Felicitas Macgilchrist, Dr. phil., leitet die Abteilung "Mediale Transformationen" am Georg-Eckert-Institut - Leibniz Institut für internationale Schulbuchforschung (GEI) in Braunschweig und ist Professorin für Medienforschung mit dem Schwerpunkt Bildungsmedien an der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Sie forscht an der Schnittstelle von Medien und schulischer Bildung mit einem besonderen Fokus auf den sozialen und politischen Kontext von Bildung in der digitalen Welt.
Twitter: @discoursology
http://www.gei.de/mitarbeiter/dr-felicitas-macgilchrist.html-
Elastic Textbooks: Pulling National Pasts Forward
Elastische Lehrbücher: Von mitgezogenen Vergangenheit(en)
Elastic Textbooks: Pulling National Pasts Forward
History textbooks have always been changing. From textual narratives in the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century’s books filled with images, source documents and tasks. Now, in our postdigital twenty-first century, textbooks are moving online as apps and websites. But what happens to the content as textbooks’ materiality changes? I suggest here that textbooks are “elastic”. Like an elastic band, they pull the national(ist) past, which was once the reason to institutionalise history education, with them. First, textbooks pull on the curriculum. Second, textbooks pull linearity with them. Third, textbooks pull on monovocality. The piece concludes by noting some augmentations which may reshape the elastic band of national(ist) history.