The School Textbook: Study – Training – Design – Development

Our initial research problem, entitled “The School Textbook: Study – Training – Design – Development”, has undergone a slight reorientation at the request of all team members, mainly due to the excessively broad and ambitious scope of the original version, which required narrowing to a more precise domain offering more promising research perspectives. Consequently, our project, now better focused, has become more functional. It will examine education for a culture of peace and citizenship through the French language textbook.

The school textbook remains a highly important didactic tool. It concretely reflects the educational methodology currently adopted within the national education system, namely the competency-based approach. This new theoretical framework, initiated in 2003 as part of the educational reform, responded to several pressing imperatives following the profound and painful transformations experienced by Algerian society, requiring the introduction of a more coherent framework adapted to contemporary realities.

Our work will focus on the culture of peace in general, and citizenship in particular. These axiological values have long been promoted by the Algerian state, particularly through the constitution and the national charter, but also — and especially — by the Ministry of National Education, which is responsible for transmitting them. This is a delicate mission that has not always been successful, as illustrated by the Black Decade experienced by the country, which partly reflects a failure of the educational mission.

We will examine these two key values through French language textbooks used in secondary education across all streams. This choice is motivated by several factors. We believe that learners at this stage, generally aged between 16 and 20, are sufficiently mature and more receptive to such values. Moreover, these students are more capable of expressing themselves.

Our objective is also to evaluate the work of textbook designers by analysing their methodological choices to determine whether these values are present and how they are conveyed, in order to assess their relevance and effectiveness. In other words, we aim to determine whether this didactics of peace culture and citizenship contributes to forming the Algerian of tomorrow — an Algerian who is open to the world.

It should be noted that the research work already undertaken is not being questioned. Our documentation, which is still ongoing, will be limited to French language secondary school textbooks produced before and after the Algerian educational reform. In other words, we will reflect on the values addressed in these textbooks before and after the national tragedy experienced by the country, values that are intended to educate children towards peace and citizenship.