The Irish Readers Revisited: The Power of the Text(book)
Keywords:
Irish, Critical pedagogy, Gender representation, Knowledge productionAbstract
The Irish Readers, the first textbooks authorized for use in Upper Canada (1846), provide evidence of deeper social-historical processes of knowledge production. A study of the pedagogy, form, and content of representative lessons uncovers an ideological matrix meant to reproduce society on fixed lines of race, class, and gender. Such class-specific social theory silently structures textbooks, giving precedence to certain forms of knowledge. A critical semiotics of the textbook would counter common assumptions about knowledge and its dissemination.
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