Thinking comparatively about the textbook: oscillating between the national, the international and the global

Abstract

This article suggests an imagining of textbooks as sites oscillating between three different but interrelated archives: the national, the international, and the global. Any textbook, it is argued, draws on themes and perspectives from these three archives and this hybridization of the textbook produces ambivalence. Unclear and ambivalent messages in the textbook are signs of difficulties in accommodating the competing narratives of community and identity that are constituted in the national, the international, and the global. This specific approach to textbooks is discussed with examples of social studies textbooks from England and Greece, especially history textbooks.