Research on school textbooks, including projects at the Georg Eckert Institute, has to date primarily been conducted as textual analysis. Studies have investigated, for instance, the discursive strategies underpinning narrative constructions of the history of the nation state or of (national) images of the self and the other. Understanding schooling and educational media as sites of identification and identity construction remains a central interest for the globalisation research area. It aims, however, to go beyond the sometimes too narrow focus on the nation-state. It acknowledges the redefinition or dissolution of national borders and considers the relevance of a notion of ‘world society’. In addition, the research area pays sustained attention to the socio-cultural contexts in which educational media are developed, disseminated and used. One reason for this focus is the premise that globalisation has led to significant changes in the processes of media production, dissemination and reception. Projects in this research area are thus situated at the nexus of three levels of analysis.

• School knowledge(s) and the constitution of globalisation in texts
  That educational media constitute rather than simply reflect reality is an insight which has long been shared among textbook researchers drawing on discourse theories. The projects in this research area join this body of work. We explore how, and as what, globalisation is discursively constructed in diverse national contexts. To this end, projects draw on two complementary research strategies. Some projects analyse how particular topics, which have gained in importance in a globalising world, are represented in educational media used in schools. The focus is currently on projects which analyse educational media to study how national memory cultures are changing as the global interrelatedness among diverse local discourses intensifies. An area we are currently expanding explores how educational media deal with the increasingly widespread reflexive awareness of social heterogeneity and diversity.

• Globalisation and the production of school knowledge(s) in institutional contexts
  Textbooks, and in particular history textbooks, represent a specific genre. History textbooks have been defined as a form of ‘national autobiography’, in which societies bear witness to the collective meanings they assign to their past and to the implications of these meanings for today and the future. Alternatively, textbooks can also be seen as a kind of nodal point for a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory and conflicting discourses. The textbook is thus understood as a hybrid genre which incorporates – at least potentially – discourses operating on a range of diverse social levels. This understanding gives new force to research asking which actors are empowered to draw on which legitimation resources to successfully participate in negotiations about the contents of educational media. Equally interesting is the question of which political and social institutions decide which knowledges and meanings are adopted by educational media, and how these decisions are made. This issue includes, inter alia, Ministries of Education, professional associations, publishing houses and non-governmental organisations. A fundamental premise for our research area is that these issues are becoming increasingly salient in the contexts of globalisation. We have observed that a growing number of decisions about education being made at a transnational level, by, for instance, the EU, the OSCE or OECD; local actors are increasingly referring to guidelines issued by transnational actors such as the International Task Force for Holocaust Education.

• Globalisation and the production of knowledge in school contexts
  It is generally agreed that the critical textual analysis of textbooks does not yet indicate which knowledge is communicated or presented in schools, nor what students make of the textbook content. This research area responds to recent calls to investigate teachers’ and students’ reactions to, and use of, educational media.  This is particularly relevant today since globalisation is associated with two significant changes to the status of the textbook:
  
  
  • Firstly, the canonisation of knowledge is increasingly difficult at a time when the centres of knowledge production are both multiplying and fragmenting. The validity and normativity of national configurations of knowledge is decreasing as knowledge producers and consumers develop an awareness that the same events are perceived and constructed quite differently in other parts of the world.
  • Secondly, as a result of the global media revolution, educational media developed for schools and the knowledge they represent must increasingly compete with forms of knowledge transmitted by other media. The internet, as the dominant medium of the global age, is perhaps the most visible aspect of this competition.

These two processes are leading to heightened demands on the reflexivity – and more generally, the media competence – of those individuals who must now deal with what has become contingent knowledge. Finally, people today are confronted more than ever before with the necessity and difficulty of dealing with enormous amounts of information. This information has to be structured, but since institutional support for general selection criteria has vanished, individuals can only refer to themselves to create coherence and meaning. The ways in which individuals manage to deal with these challenges are not the explicit focus of the projects in this research area. Nevertheless, the issues outlined here provide a normative horizon which will frame future classroom observations.