Textbooks Transformed for the Digital Era: The Ongoing Uses of Texts in Inquiry-Based Learning

With so many free and readily available teaching resources online, textbooks might appear quaint. Yet the proliferation of digital resource suites accompanying textbooks along with the creation of open, online textbooks suggest that textbooks are not what they once were. This case study investigates how grades 9-12 global history courses might use the OpenStax World History text effectively in conjunction with inquiry-based learning. By exploring the collaborative and didactic benefits, this proposal aims to probe the relevance and potential of OpenStax World History textbook for inquiry-based global history. OpenStax will be compared to more traditional textbooks, including Robert Strayer’s Ways of the World, as well as more narrative-driven, theory-forward introductory texts, like Robert Marks’s Origins of the Modern World – either of which could also be used as supplements alongside and in addition to OpenStax. With such comparisons, the paper will reflect on possibilities for fluid information transfer to students’ long-term memory via engagement with digital sources. Though focusing on what is possible with new digital textbook forms, the paper will examine the role that expository texts as such play in collaborative professional learning communities and curriculum development for team-taught courses. Ultimately, this paper argues for the ongoing importance of some kind of textbook – even if not of the traditional variety. Finally, considering the lack of standard published textbook complementary materials in the OpenStax platform, this paper will discuss teacher-generated History Labs, featuring secondary and primary sources that “open up the textbook,” facilitate structured academic controversies, and teach students how to think like a historian. Inasmuch as there remains a role for teachers not just to curate but also to develop such material, it is worth asking about the extent to which increasingly numerous digital options have really fundamentally changed textbooks or for that matter history instruction as such.