Inasmuch as the decision to forego textbook use altogether imposes real drawbacks on course design and execution, this panel instead explores how to do things with textbooks. Reflecting on a variety of themes related to textbooks, including their useful characteristics, typical limitations, curricular scaffolding, collaborative possibilities, and changing needs, the papers in the panel are attentive to matters of both skill and content, especially as these are calibrated to student captivation and learning. The first paper, “Centering Narrative Cohesion in High School Global History Courses,” argues that history courses without textbooks can often lose narrative cohesion. Departments’ team-teaching contexts also can become a bit of a grab bag as various colleagues add their own historical items of interest or favorite lessons to the mix. Suddenly, history appears as an empty continuum filled with events, which become facts for retrieval to be banked in the minds of students. Missed is the academic discipline’s active construction of historical knowledge. If narratives can seem reductive, they also offer opportunities to reflect on interpretive frameworks. The second paper, “Building on a Textbook: Historiographical, Methodological, and Narrative Scaffolding in World History Instruction,” offers a case study of a course using two specific books to demonstrate the importance of and broader principles for incorporating attention to the practices behind scholarly knowledge production, providing students with the tools to analyze history systematically. The third paper, “Textbooks Transformed for the Digital Era: The Ongoing Uses of Texts in Inquiry-Based Learning,” explores textbook selection from three angles: possibilities for collegial collaboration in team-taught courses, student learning and retention when using digitally-based textbooks and supplementary digital suites versus or alongside more traditional paper-bound volumes, and the ongoing desirability of heavily narrative-driven books.

Ultimately, this panel demonstrates how textbooks can continue to fill varied classroom needs through the suggestion of solutions to typical course design concerns regarding textbooks and their alternatives. Though grounded in high school global history instructional experiences, this panel pertains to undergraduate instruction as well, insofar as the papers treat common curricular design matters and review specific textbooks also assigned in college-level survey courses.