An Inclusive Representation in the School Textbook
Fabio Filosofi, University of Trento (Italy)
Abstract
School textbooks are a fundamental tool that is responsible for the vision of the world presented to students through images, drawings and texts. It is important to analyze what kind of social perspective school textbooks generally represent in order to avoid the exclusion of all identities. Former research has highlighted the difficulties in representing a broad variety of identities in school textbooks: the current study thus aims to focus on teachers’ cognition and teachers’ attitudes towards the representation of special identities. Starting from the results of the qualitative research on teachers’ attitudes on representation of special needs identities within school textbooks, this paper analyzes the importance of an inclusive representation within school textbooks and presents a new perspective as regards the representation in school materials. The study revealed that for teachers school textbooks are not inclusive and they are responsible for implicit and explicit prejudice. This study points out that teachers can be bringers of change by remedying to the lack of an inclusive representation through the adaptation of school materials.
Keywords: Inclusion, representation, special needs, textbook, teachers’ attitudes;