Purpose of the Study
To my knowledge, no one has ever attempted to hold a magnifying glass up to the textbook development process across non-dominant languages. The pieces of documentation that do exist tend to discuss only one or two projects that the authors were personally involved in (Chatry-Komarek 1996, Rosekrans, Sherris, and Chatry-Komarek 2012), or to provide broad recommendations and guidelines (Crabbe, Nyingi, & Abadzi 2014, McCullough 1968), with little information about how previous projects have proceeded. The goal of this project is to use principles of cognitive task analysis to understand how international education consultants think about creating textbooks, to understand the mental models, work conditions, and team interactions that contribute to finished textbook in non-dominant languages (Crandall, Klein, and Hoffman, 2006). Through examining these stories together, common patterns can emerge that will be helpful in training future international education consultants, as well as conducting research in what makes textbooks effective aids for learning. The study will establish broad common themes and issues, as well as describing encapsulating incidents that illustrate aspects of the textbook creation process. It will serve as a resource for future textbook creation workers, as well as furthering our knowledge of how the goals and values of people on the development team affect textbooks.
Research Questions
Concepts
Constructs
Scope
The scope of this study is limited to textbook creation for non-dominant languages, specifically through processes that involve international agencies and/or ministries of education and teams of international and local educators. Textbook creation by publishing houses, while interesting, is likely to be unavailable through the professional networks accessed in this study. Textbook creation for dominant languages is likewise out of bounds, largely because the processes are assumed to be very different than those for non-dominant languages.