Textbook of the Year 2018
Textbook of the Year Awards Ceremony at didacta in Hanover / Secondary school Textbooks for languages, social studies and STEM subjects honoured / Textbooks demonstrate why specialist subjects are relevant
On 20 February 2018 the winners of the Textbook of the Year were announced at the didacta trade fair in Hanover. This year the jury of experts from academia, educational practice and publishing houses examined books for the lower secondary level. The history book mBook Geschichte was the winner in the ‘Society’ category. First place in the ‘Languages’ category was awarded to Highlight 5, and matheWerkstatt 9 won the ‘Mathematics’ category. The award is under the patronage of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the German Länder.
The Georg Eckert Institute has presented the ‘Textbook of the Year’ award annually since 2012. The bpd (Federal Agency for Civic Education) has partnered the Leibniz Institute since 2016 in awarding this prize and they joined with the Didacta Association for the first time this year. The jury honours outstanding contemporary textbooks that demonstrate bold and innovative approaches to education. The criteria taken into consideration in the selection of the ‘Textbook of the Year’ are: didactic concept, subject relevance, a pupil-oriented and skill-centred approach, comprehensibility and design.
The award honours authors and editors who develop and implement innovative textbook concepts. It serves to stimulate the debate surrounding textbook quality and promotes the evolution of teaching materials. Textbooks should be designed to communicate knowledge and stimulate curiosity; they should be relevant to pupils’ everyday lives and should help them process information. This year’s winners were able to fulfil these diverse requirements with great success. ‘These textbooks impressed us because not only do they illustrate what pupils should be learning, but also the reasons why. They achieve this through embedding their topics within real-life situations or social contexts: pupils learn how young people in England or Spain actually speak. Maths books address everyday questions and history books create a bridge to the present’ explains Professor Eckhardt Fuchs, director of the Georg Eckert Institute and chairman of the jury.
‘I am delighted to witness a trend towards social studies books being founded in real-life, and lesson content that more closely reflects the lives of young people’ said Tomas Krüger, president of the bpb. ‘It is, after all, a fundamental requirement of political education that young people, who are reputedly not interested in ‘politics’, learn to understand the number of political decisions that directly affect them.’
For more information see: http://www.textbook-of-the-year.de
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