International Society for Research on Textbooks and Educational Media e.V.

“Educational Media as Political and Societal Case of Conflict” – IGSBi Conference 2025 in Vienna

The next conference of the International Society for Research on Textbooks and Educational Media e.V. will take place from September 26 to 28, 2025, at the University of Vienna (Austria). It will deal with the topic “Educational Media as Political and Societal Case of Conflict”.

Further information and registration modalities will be announced here at a later stage.

PUBLICATION LEARNING TO READ, LEARNING RELIGION HONOURED WITH THIS YEAR’S “EDITED BOOK AWARD”

Results of an initiative of the Reading Primers SIG have recently gained prominent recognition:

The “Edited Book Award Committee” of the “Children’s Literature Association” (ChLA) unanimously voted for the volume Learning to Read, Learning Religion. Catechism primers in Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries to be recognized as an Honor Book for this year’s “Edited Book Award”. The honoured book, edited by Britta Juska-Bacher, Matthew Grenby, Tuija Laine and Wendelin Sroka, has been published in 2023 by John Benjamins, Amsterdam: https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027254955.

The ChLA, with headquarters in Purcellville, VA (USA), is a non-profit association of scholars, critics, professors, students, librarians, teachers and institutions dedicated to the academic study of literature for children ( https://www.childlitassn.org/). The “Edited Book Award” is presented annually by the ChLA to recognize the contribution of outstanding collections of essays to children's literature scholarship and criticism. Eligible titles have been published two years prior to the award date.

In a message to the editors of Learning to Read, Learning Religion Naomi Lesley, professor in the English department at Holyoke Community College and Edited Book Award Committee Chair of the ChLA, states: “Each of the committee members noted the unique contribution this volume made to the field, and recognized the thoughtfulness of its editorial design as well as the impressive archival work and coordination involved. Thank you for your efforts to bring this book into the world!”

With all editors and many authors being members of the RP-SIG network, the award acknowledges the efforts of all those who have been involved in the preparation of the volume. The award is a welcome support to increasing the visibility of historical primer research internationally, and not least an incentive to continue the transnational historical study of reading primers as a research field that crosses the boundaries of countries, languages, and monodisciplinary scholarship.

“Sustainability and Educational Media” – IGSBi Conference 2024 in Augsburg (Germany)

From September 27 to 29, 2024, the Annual Conference of the International Society for Research on Textbook and Educational Media took place at the University of Augsburg (Germany) under the topic “Sustainability and Educational Media”. Academics and publishers from nine European countries and Japan discussed a wide variety of aspects of the topic from historical and current perspectives.

After two introductory presentations on the concept, history and future of sustainability and sustainability as a topic in textbooks, the first panel dealt with sustainability as a topic in educational media for schools and teacher training – historically, for example, in Johann Bernhard Basedow’s so-called Elementarwerk and in textbooks from the imperial era, and currently in interdisciplinary and subject-specific teaching materials (e.g. for geography and foreign languages) for the classroom. In addition to textbooks, the speakers also looked at school murals, educational comics and non-fiction films as well as virtual reality presentations. In another panel, learning spaces in nature were presented as educational media for sustainability, such as didactic arrangements in learning gardens and nature trails. Workshop contributions discussed the production of educational media from a sustainability perspective, particularly with regard to the design of open educational resources. Moreover, the question of sustainability of (school) learning was also discussed in detail, for example in the contributions from the IGSBi Special Interest Group Working Primers. The contributions stimulated lively, inspiring discussions and impulses for further research.

A volume with many contributions from this conference will be published in 2025.

Newsletter of the Reading Primers Special Interest Group

Newsletter No. 19 of the Reading Primers Special Interest Group (RP SIG)

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New Publications

Ewa Andrzejewska / Eva Matthes / Sylvia Schütze / Jan Van Wiele (Eds.): Bildungsmedien für Erwachsene. Educational Media for Adults (Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt 2024)

Educational media are used in teaching/learning contexts across the lifespan. Among other things, they play an important role as materials for teaching staff at various educational institutions and can be found as informal printed and digital materials on health, political and many other topics. The fact that adult users often consciously select these media suggests a high level of expectation, but also a strong openness to the content offered, which is not always unproblematic given the heterogeneity of the providers. The contributions in this volume by researchers from different disciplines and different countries deal with the specifics of adult learning in general, with informal educational media, media for teachers, for higher education, language teaching and use in development cooperation; they show the diversity of topics and research aspects in this hitherto neglected field.

Free download of the whole book (Open Access)

Eva Matthes / Christine Ott / Sylvia Schütze / Dieter Wrobel (Eds.): Kontinuität und Wandel von Wissen in Bildungsmedien. Continuity and Change of Knowledge in Educational Media (Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt 2024)

In the school context, knowledge in educational media is aligned with laws, educational standards and curricula; in non-school contexts, it is usually less strongly regulated, but still orientated towards agreements or guiding principles.

Educational media knowledge is sometimes surprisingly persistent; at the same time, the content of educational media can be seismographs for change, sometimes even developing “subversive” potential by undermining guidelines. Their potential in both respects can only be categorised in relation to references and knowledge productions outside the educational medium.

The contributions in this volume consider the multifaceted nature of the concept of knowledge and offer multi-layered approaches to the complexity of the topic. In addition to subject-related research on educational media knowledge, there are studies on the implementation of pedagogical-didactic knowledge, analyses of media-material pre-figurations of knowledge transfer and acquisition as well as reconstructions of socio-cultural knowledge and its historical or cultural-historical presentation.

Link to the table of contents and to the introduction

Jasmine Annette Dorigo: Lehr- und Lernmittel für den Sprachunterricht im ladinischen Sprachraum Südtirols. Eine historisch-didaktische Analyse von Mehrsprachigkeit [Learning and Teaching Supplies for Language Teaching in the Ladin-speaking Areas of South Tyrol. A Historic-Didactical Analysis of Multilingualism] (Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt 2024)

Teaching institutions of the Ladin valleys of the Dolomites are known for their multilingualism. Multilingual teaching needs respective supplies for learning and teaching.

The goal of the publication is to analyse especially important learning and teaching supplies for language teaching at Ladin primary schools of Badia Valley (Gadertal) and Valley Gardena (Gröden). The teaching and learning supply analyses affect both the historical schoolbooks that trace back to the parity schools (1948), as well as the contemporary supplies that are used currently (2023) in Ladin primary schools. The main focus lies on language didactics. Overall, the learning and teaching supply analyses give an insight into the development and changes at Ladin schools of South Tyrol between 1948 and the 21st century.