Paradigm, 2/2 (October, 2000)

The research programme on school textbooks is based at the Institut Nationale de Recherche Pédagogique in Paris. It has a national, international and an historical dimension.

Nationally, a data bank has been constituted containing about 30, 000 references to textbooks published since the French Revolution for 12 different subjects, mainly in modern languages, history, geography, and civic and moral education. The Bibliothèque Nationale agreed in 1991 to use the criteria devised for the Emmanuelle data bank to classify the current production of textbooks, to make possible their automatic integration into the data bank. The Emmanuelle data bank will shortly be available on the internet.

All works dealing with textbooks and published since the middle of the 19th century have beenentered into the Emmanuelle 5 data bank. This may be consulted according to various key words, and each document is summarised. A bibliographic analysis was published in 1993 and updated in 1995.

In 1993 a book was published reviewing all official texts which since 1791 regulated the issue, control, financing and dissemination of French school text-books. From 1989 onwards, an historical study was made of all publishers of school textbooks with a view to understanding their main characteristics, their evolution from 1789 on, and the links between them. Two major contributions were made in L’Histoire de L’Édition Française in 1986 and 1999.

A study has also been undertaken to find out which textbooks in primary schools were chosen by teachers and how they were used, for the period 1880 to 1914. Research is also ongoing into the way text-books have been typographically conceived since the Revolution. Further a semiological analysis of text-book titles is in progress.

Internationally the Emmanuelle Network has resulted in collaboration with a number of foreign institutions to agree a common standard for the bibliographic treatment of textbooks. A European project was financed by the French Ministry of Technology with a view to developing a European Network of research on textbooks. Since 1990, a great number of international meetings have taken place at which papers on textbooks have been produced in numerous languages. As a result an international association called IARTEM was formed.

The activities of the Emmanuelle Research Project have been able to feed in historical perspectives into French teacher education, as well as giving advice on the choice of textbooks.

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Paradigm Catalogue Textbook Colloquium