earticle

영어

This study explores the reading texts and culture sections of 5th and 6th grade elementary English textbooks from a critical pedagogy perspective. This study adopted qualitative approaches to discover and critically present parts where any potential discrimination was found and to suggest more ideal ways to present countries, races, and cultures in textbooks. Specifically, this study investigated how different countries and races in the reading passages and culture sections are presented and examined prejudices and biases that the textbooks allusively produced. The results displayed that certain countries were presented in a decontextualized way with shallow information and described as economically and politically lagging while only positive aspects of some counties were magnified. As for racial analysis, it was shown that white characters were mainly presented at the center of illustrations. Furthermore, the characters who solved challenging issues over the world and received positive evaluations were also represented mainly by the white race. Much of the cultural content was presented simply without sufficient background information, and many of the current political power dynamics were revealed.