Textbooks and educational media

Abstract der Sitzung

Over the last few years, educational media have experienced dramatic changes in Geography as a school subject and beyond. On the one hand, several countries moved digitization to the forefront. For example, the German federal government dedicated considerable funding to digital learning and teaching research. On the other hand, the global COVID-19 pandemic forced practitioners to move their classrooms into virtual or hybrid spaces, leading to innovation in educational media content and novel teaching and learning formats. However, only a few months into the pandemic showed, as Bagoly-Simó et al. (2021) indicate, that for students living in challenging socio-economical settings, even in economically developed countries, textbooks became the online option to keep up with distance education and have access to education at all.

Such development challenges scholarship in Geography Education and beyond. However, past interest in textbooks, in particular, and educational media, in general, has been episodic at best (cf. Bagoly-Simó, 2019, 2021), recurring to a limited set of methods and exhibiting a rather explicit resistance to theories. In light of these developments, and continuing with the tradition of the past DKG (since 2013), this session invites contributions in English and German addressing textbooks and educational media. We welcome presentations in German and English. Along with empirical studies, we are particularly interested in theoretical papers. Continuing with this session’s tradition, presenters are encouraged to submit their contribution to a journal special issue.