Textbook perspectives

I was sort of aware this issue with textbooks because for my birthday I got the book Lies My Teacher Told Me which addresses a lot of issues with text book publication.  ( I don’t know what this choice of present says about me or the friends who gave it to me…)  This is the Wikipedia link about the book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me (I know it’s not a “real” source, but it will just give you an idea of what the book is about if you haven’t heard of it before.)

Jessica’s idea to use primary sources is a really good one.  I think teachers are encouraged to do that for other reasons as well, but a teacher can highlight the fact that textbooks are a source with a perspective, just like primary sources, while discussing firsthand accounts.  Jessica mentioned that it would obviously be difficult to use all different textbooks, and I agree that it would be pretty impossible to have students (or a school district) buy and read different accounts for every topic just to “cover all the bases” as she said.  I did hear of a teacher in my high school who was able to do something like that for awhile.  The school wanted to adopt a new AP US History textbook so the teacher was able to use all different samples the first year she was teaching the course.  So the class read one textbook for one unit, and then switched to another textbook for another unit.  After they had gotten a feel for each of the different books being considered the class gave their feedback about the way different texts covered different issues.  For example, did one text give no information on how women and minorities were affected in comparison to one that gave very thorough coverage? Was one text more organized and coherent than other?  That’s one example when students got exposure to textbooks not being the absolute truth.  It’s not always possible to do it that way, but there are ways to demonstrate perspective to students, even with sources that are often considered “neutral”.