Pushing content: How the culture of educational publishing influences the decisions social studies editors make and the programs they craft.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Textbooks are one of the most ubiquitous educational tools in the contemporary classroom, yet little is known about the editors who create them. While increasingly bureaucratized and mechanized, craft remains an integral aspect of the textbook publishing process. While driven by the bottom line, textbooks are rarely produced by impersonal factors. Lacking significant research on which to build, this study employed a grounded theory methodology and took the first tentative steps in exploring how the culture of educational publishing influences the decisions social studies editors make and the programs they craft.
This primarily interview-based dissertation, which involved twenty-seven participants, the majority of whom were textbook editors, does two things. First it proposes an analytic framework for how to study the complex variables that influence editorial decision-making. Second this study uses this framework to analyze how curricular and instructional conventions, personal bias, institutional practices, and various market forces impact the development of textbooks. This study argues that the escalating costs and risks that have transformed the educational publishing industry have made the influence of these variables more pronounced, exacting, and rigid.
Research into the culture of textbook editors has implications for three groups in the educational community---textbook researchers, teachers, and educational publishers. This study provides important contextual information that will help textbook researchers ground their research and reforms in the realities of the textbook development process. In understanding how textbooks are developed teachers will better appreciate the inherent strengths and weaknesses of textbooks, and the important role teachers play in shaping the textbook marketplace. The more educational publishers appreciate the constraints and biases that have built up in the culture of publishing, the better able they will be at instituting practices that foster innovation, vitality, and growth.