Literacies and the Development of Social, Critical, and Creative Thought in Textbook Activities for Primary Education in Social Sciences and the Spanish Language

Abstract

The skills of thinking, reading conceptions and reading practice (literacy levels) found in textbook activities for the sixth year of Primary Education in Social Sciences and Spanish Language in Spain are analyzed in this paper. A mixed methodology is used to triangulate the data, integrating the critical analysis of discourse and two types of statistical analysis: descriptive (frequencies and percentages) and inferential (χ2, ANOVA, and the Mann-Whitney U Test). The results inform us of both the permanence and the strengthening of the design of an activity oriented toward the development of traditional conceptions of linguistic-cognitive reading. In the framework of education for global citizenship, the conclusion is the need for student reading practices that begin with the principles of critical literacy directed at the acquisition of social, critical, and creative thinking skills.

By Toutatis! Trainee Teachers’ Motivation When Using Comics to Learn History

“…Therefore, the visual aspect of this resource must be highlighted, as images have, in the words of Becerra Romero and Jorge Godoy (2014, p. 17), the "added value that they avoid pages and pages of descriptions and help to set the scene and contextualise the characters. " In this way, comics facilitate the understanding and visualisation of historical information (Saitua, 2018b;Ortega-Sánchez et al, 2019). Furthermore, the obtained via the open questions endorse the idea that comics are a tool with great potential in terms of motivating students (Altarriba, 2003;Gutiérrez, 2006;Saitua, 2018a).…”

Building Historical Narratives about Controversial Issues on Twitter: An Analysis of Digital Literacy Levels in Secondary School Students

“…The total number of codes generated was gathered in categorical families concomitant to the conceptual constructions of gender, historical empathy, and social consciousness, three thematic-structural axes widely evidenced by the Building Historical Narratives about Controversial Issues on Twitter: An Analysis of Digital… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.95972 scientific literature on education historically, and specifically directed to education for democratic citizenship. In a second phase of categorization, the informational contents associated with the three theoretical categories were again grouped, through constant comparison of the data [16], into one of the three levels of literacy defined and applied by Ortega-Sánchez, Ibáñez and Sanz [3], and Ortega-Sánchez, Sanz de la Cal and Ibáñez [4]: literal literacy (reading the lines), cognitive or inferential literacy (reading between the lines), and critical literacy (reading behind the lines). The results of the interpretation and analysis of this last categorization are those presented in this research.…”

“…According to Cassany [2], reading is a transitive verb and there is no neutral or abstract reading activity, but multiple, versatile and dynamic ways of approaching understanding of each discursive genre, in each discipline of knowledge and in each human community. In this line, Ortega-Sánchez, Ibáñez and Sanz de la Cal [3], and Ortega-Sánchez, Sanz de Cal and Ibáñez [4] distinguish three levels of literacy according to the skills, abilities or competences to understand any type of text: literal literacy (reading the lines): This is a reading practice in which the person is able to recover the semantic value of words and the relationships they establish within the grammatical structure; cognitive or inferential literacy (reading between the lines): In this reading practice, the cognitive skills of the reader allow him/her to understand the information; critical literacy (reading behind the lines): This level of literacy adds to the two previous ones the conception of reading as a cultural practice inserted in a specific context, allowing action and social commitment. This reading practice is based on the differentiation between facts and opinions; the assessment of the veracity of the information; the identification of the intentionality or ideology of the text; the evaluation of the reliability of the sources; the disruption in the hegemonic discourse; and the decision making for responsible social action.…”

Analysis of Cognitive Skills in History Textbook (Spain-England-Portugal)

“…In Spain, the analysis of textbooks has been a fruitful line of research over the last 20 years (Valls, 2001(Valls, , 2007(Valls, , 2008Gómez et al, 2014;Ortega et al, 2019). Rafael Valls is the leading Spanish author on this subject and a pioneer in approaching these manuals rigorously and systematically from the didactics of social sciences.…”