Reviews
Through its multiple examples and case studies, The Textbook and the Lecture shows the philosophical assumptions underpinning longstanding debates and serves to inform and perhaps even empower educational workers by helping them understand why they do what they do.
Friesen's book should be attractive to students and instructors of curriculum and instruction as well as instructional designers and educational technology professionals. Educational start-ups and entrepreneurs might fnd it particularly helpful in placing new products in the context of the longue durée of education history.
Encouraging readers to look at newer forms of media used in education through a historical lens, Friesen deconstructs two successful archetypes of educational media—the lecture and the textbook—to expose their deep structure. This book should be attractive to teachers, school administrators, and anyone involved in higher education.
In this work of meticulous interdisciplinary scholarship, Friesen provides a much-needed historical and nuanced perspective on the resonance and persistence of media in education throughout the centuries. He guides the reader through the tangled roots and continuities sustaining these often-contentious elements of education, and in doing so gives a subtle but compelling riposte to claims that in the digital age either the textbook or the lecture is 'dead.'
Book Details
Preface
Part I
1. No More Pencils, No More Books?
2. Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century
Part II
3. Psychology and the Rationalist
4. The Romantic Tradition
5. Romantic versus Rationalist Reform
6
Preface
Part I
1. No More Pencils, No More Books?
2. Writing Instruction in the Twenty-First Century
Part II
3. Psychology and the Rationalist
4. The Romantic Tradition
5. Romantic versus Rationalist Reform
6. Theorizing Media—by the Book
Part III
7. A Textbook Case
8. From Translatio Studiorum to "Intelligences Thinking in Unison"
9. The Lecture as Postmodern Performance
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index