Call for papers 68

(January-June 2027)

Topic: Between pages and contexts: Textbooks under discussion [1]

Deadline for reception:

June 30, 2026

 

Coordinators

Josué Alejandro Jiménez Cuéllar, DIE-CINVESTAV

Náyade Soledad Monter Arizmendi, DIE-CINVESTAV

Paola Ramírez Martinell, El Colegio de México

 

From the earliest printed schoolbooks to today’s digital formats, textbooks have played a central role in education, acting as cultural devices that select, organize, and legitimize knowledge (Escolano, 2001). Mexico was a pioneer in the free production and distribution of textbooks for basic education, a model later adopted by several European and Latin American countries at different educational levels (Díaz, 2008; Ixba, 2013; Roldán, 2025).

The terminology used to refer to these materials has varied over time, shaped by the prevailing pedagogical models and educational aims of each era (Chartier & Brito, 2024). Today, the term textbook is widely used and, in the Mexican context, strongly associated with the creation of the National Commission for Free Textbooks in 1959 (Ixba, 2013). However, it also serves as an analytical category that encompasses a diverse range of school materials, acknowledging their historical specificity and pedagogical transformations.

Beyond their role as curricular tools, textbooks are complex artifacts that condense pedagogical and political projects, ideological debates, editorial decisions, and representations of childhood, citizenship, and gender, among other elements (Choppin, 1992, 2001). They are an essential part of the school experience: not only do they transmit knowledge, but they also establish knowledge hierarchies, propose reading paths, and shape communication practices (Rockwell, 1994a, 1994b). These processes are embedded in typographies, visual elements, layouts, and paratexts, all framed by specific conditions of production, regulation, distribution, and appropriation (Díaz, 2008; Cruder, 2008; Friesen, 2017).

Studying textbooks requires going beyond content analysis to consider them as tools of state intervention, sites of national identity formation, and symbolic arenas of negotiation over what is considered shared knowledge. This perspective invites examination of how textbooks are produced and regulated, how they circulate, what practices and meanings they generate, and how they are appropriated by teachers, students, and communities in different educational settings.

Issue 68 of Sinéctica. Electronic Education Journal invites researchers and scholars to submit research articles or theoretical essays that critically examine textbooks and other printed or digital educational materials—such as school manuals, primers, workbooks, atlases, or readers—used across educational levels for instructional purposes.

From historical, pedagogical, cultural, editorial, and visual perspectives, this issue seeks to bring together contributions that explore these materials as complex artifacts situated within networks shaped by public policy, curricular decisions, epistemological disputes, editorial practices, graphic languages, visual regimes, and reading and writing practices. We are particularly interested in analyses of how these dimensions shape meaning, produce subjectivities, and structure knowledge hierarchies in diverse educational contexts.

Priority will be given to contributions that present clearly defined research problems, adopt critical and analytical approaches, and offer empirically or theoretically grounded arguments. Broadly descriptive or general overviews will not be considered.

 

Thematic Areas

● Educational Policies

Analyses of textbooks and other school materials as tools of state intervention and curricular policy. Topics may include educational reforms, curricula and study plans, disputes over content and pedagogy, and their political, social, or school-level implications across different national and historical contexts.

 

● Editorial Systems

Research on the production, regulation, circulation, and innovation of educational materials in school settings. Topics may cover publishing projects, legal and institutional frameworks, infrastructures, book circuits, and printing or digitization technologies, examined in relation to school knowledge and pedagogical, aesthetic, or political decisions.

 

● Materiality and Visualities

Studies of visual and material aspects of educational materials—design, images, typography, layout, paratexts—as integral to their pedagogical meaning. We especially welcome contributions that explore how materiality organizes ways of seeing, reading, teaching, and shaping school experiences.

 

● Reading and Writing Practices

Studies focused on how textbooks and other materials are used, interpreted, and appropriated by teachers, students, and communities. We encourage situated analyses that explore tensions between curricular prescriptions, didactic models, and actual teaching practices.

 

● Gender and Sexuality

Research from feminist, intersectional, decolonial, or queer perspectives that examine representations of gender and sexuality in textbooks. Topics may include presence or absence of women, femininities, masculinities, and gender dissidences, and the ways in which these representations have evolved across discursive, curricular, visual, and pedagogical dimensions.

 

● Interculturality and Situated Knowledges

Studies examining how cultural, linguistic, and territorial diversity is represented in school materials. We invite critical approaches to the representation, translation, hierarchization, appropriation, or silencing of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and rural knowledge systems, and to the epistemological frameworks used to legitimize school knowledge.

 

● Digital Culture and Artificial Intelligence

Analyses of continuities and shifts between print and digital media. Topics may include emerging formats, platforms, reading practices, digitalization processes, and the use of AI in the production or mediation of educational content, with attention to their pedagogical, ethical, and political implications.

 

With this issue, Sinéctica aims to foster a plural and interdisciplinary dialogue that reimagines textbooks as living objects shaped by history, politics, pedagogy, and visual culture, and to contribute to a broader understanding of their evolving role in contemporary education.

 

References

Chartier, A. M., & Brito, A. (2024). Tras los gestos de la enseñanza. Un andar posible para la investigación y la formación. FLACSO Argentina / Ediciones Tornasol.

Choppin, A. (1992). Les manuels scolaires: Histoire et actualité. Hachette Éducation.

Choppin, A. (2001). Past and present of school textbooks. Educación y Pedagogía, 13(29–30), 209–229. https://revistas.udea.edu.co/index.php/revistaeyp/article/view/7515/6918

Cruder, G. (2008). La educación de la mirada: sobre el sentido de la imagen en los libros de texto. La Crujía.

Díaz, C. (2008). Textbooks and libraries: One book or many materials? In E. Bonilla Rius, D. Goldin, & R. Salaberria (Eds.), Bibliotecas y escuelas: retos y posibilidades en la sociedad del conocimiento (pp. 185–208). Océano.

Escolano, B. (2001). On the historical construction of textbook production in Spain. Educación y Pedagogía, 13(29–30), 13–24. https://revistas.udea.edu.co/index.php/revistaeyp/article/download/7503/6906/0

Friesen, N. (2017). The textbook and the lecture: Education in the age of new media. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Ixba, E. (2013). The creation of Mexico’s free textbooks (1959) and their impact on the publishing industry: Authors and publishers of Spanish origin. Revista Mexicana de Investigación Educativa, 18(59), 1189–1211. http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-66662013000400008

Rockwell, E. (1994a). Textbooks in perspective. Básica. Revista de la Escuela y del Maestro, 1(1), 63–64.

Rockwell, E. (1994b). Written word, oral interpretation: Textbooks in the classroom. In M. A. Candela et al. (Eds.), La construcción social del conocimiento en el aula: un enfoque etnográfico I (pp. 29–43). DIE-CINVESTAV-IPN.

Roldán, E. (2025). A brief history of textbooks in Mexico (1959–2024): Between free access, government control, and negotiation. In M. Garone & P. Ramírez (Eds.), Cultura visual y editorial en los libros de texto gratuitos. Actores, ideologías y debates en movimiento (pp. 17–50). Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes / UNAM (IIB).

 

[1] Manuscripts must be submitted through Sinéctica’s website, and only after the author has registered. Research and theoretical articles are received in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. Only unedited work is accepted. All articles, without exception, will be subjected to blind peer review by outside experts.