STAR

Hello everyone,

It´s Ana Mª Sánchez, the T8T Star for the task “Exploring the dark side of textbooks”. Well, what can I tell you about my experience? I think we have explored an interesting topic; the articles we were proposed to read were quite illuminating and instructive… I didn´t know, for example, about the existence of an Institute for International Textbook Research, just a pity, I thought at the beginning of searching into the website (http://www.gei.de), that most of the information is not translated into English (even if I was clicking the translating icon once and again). I was missing some broadcast articles that were giving examples about the different approaches to the same topic (e.g. a war, a battle or even an ideological conflict). At the end, after searching a little bit more, I found some information about textbooks in Middle East, National Identity and the images of self and other (Alayan, 2011), but was just information about a conference. Anyway, there is no much time to deepen into the topic, I mean, no before publishing the posts. Later on we can deepen into them as much as we want. And maybe, as future teachers, we should be quite aware about this issue, and the fewer intermediaries we have, the better.

             About the procedures we had to use to show this dark side of textbooks that we had been exploring through the articles and blog post we read, we were especially interested in two of them: infographics and advertisement videos. I really preferred to do an infographic… because I thought it was a cool way of showing information, especially after watching one interesting professional website (http://infographicworld.com) and particularly an infographic about Christmas and its transformation into a business; but also because I´m quite self-concious (something I have to improve, I know… not a good trait for anything, and less for a good teacher…) and, in some aspects, it was more comfortable for me to choose the infographic… But the majority gained, and even if I still have to assume that I am in youtube (I cannot believe it yet, hum… actually I try to not think of it…) Well, I have to say that I enjoyed with the whole process. What is more, I discovered there are quite skillful people in my group with the video making and with creative ideas for doing so… quite impressive the qualities that can be found around… Thanks to you all. Well, I felt supported throughout the week and, even if we had technical problems (always something happens, but we are becoming skilled at solving incidentals… aren´t we, girls?) I think the result was not bad at all, and I think we learnt quite a lot of things during the process… Even during the presentation, I had to learn to not apologise for the mistakes before presenting… I think I still have to learn quite a lot of things! And I expect to have the capacity, the motivation, the inner force and the inspiration for continuing learning… quite big desires, I know. Actually I hope to get assistance from on High, while I continue doing my part of the job. 

See you soon.

T8T team