Last week a kind student passed me a note. On the outside it read “to my favourite teacher.” My heart warmed. I unfolded the paper – to my surprise, it contained a teaching tip: “please provide us with a social studies book to help us remember.”
I remember a time when textbooks were a core element of learning. As students, we’d all get assigned a well-worn textbook, often with doodles in the margins of the text. Once I became a teacher, textbooks became much less visible in schools – for many good reasons. Digital technologies, the deluge of information brought about through the internet, and shifts in instructional practices greatly changed the way we access, present, create, and engage with information. Our understanding of content-area subjects have also evolved as educators have critically examined long-standing colonial and Eurocentric perspectives. In this context, getting rid of textbooks just made sense.
However, the decline of the textbook learning also has its consequences. Students have less access to resources that they can easily refer to without a device on hand. Many educators have turned to the internet for content that is easy to share through virtual classrooms, print, or display on a projector.
But as my student so keenly pointed out, a handy book resource can do wonders in helping students to do the one thing they should be doing with as few obstacles as possible: studying.
Recently, the Ontario government announced a significant 60 million dollar investment in Nelson Education’s Edwin platform, which essentially presents their vast collection of curriculum-aligned resources in an easy-to-navigate platform. This would seem to be a huge boon for educators, as Edwin pairs content along with student facing worksheets, lesson plans, assessments, and rubrics all in one location.
There is a lot to appreciate about that. Resources can be accessed from almost anywhere, updated without replacing an entire classroom set, and supplemented with multimedia and accessibility tools.
But when the lesson starts, it becomes clear that having a physical “IRL (in real life)” page or book would make the learning so much better. It’s a powerful practice for students to underline important information and scribble ideas in the margins. They should be solving a problems beside an example, especially in subjects like math. They should be flipping back pages to compare ideas without being distracted online. They should be talking to the student beside them rather than navigating between tabs.
So why not just print what I need? Or use the class set of Chromebooks with some sort of text markup tool? The solution is not so simple in an age where printer ink, paper, and devices are scarce.
A five-page resource for 30 students becomes 150 sheets of paper. Repeat that process over a couple months and I have used up the majority of my photocopy budget within weeks. If I want to use the digital version, multiple students are hovering over a single computer as the Chromebook to student ratio is 9 computers for 30 students in my classroom.
We have not eliminated the physical resource. We have simply transferred responsibility for producing it to the teacher. And teachers know exactly what that means: downloading, printing, photocopying, stapling, sorting, distributing and replacing lost copies. The cycle is endless and time consuming.
From this perspective, a classroom set of books starts to look a remarkably innovative solution.
A book is a resource, not a pedagogy. A skilled teacher with a textbook can still differentiate instruction, facilitate rich discussion, use culturally responsive examples, incorporate videos and simulations, provide choice, use manipulatives, and bring in additional texts and perspectives.
The humble, low-tech textbook simply provides something increasingly valuable in today’s busy classrooms, where more time must be dedicated to providing accommodations to large, intellectually diverse classes: a dependable starting point. Books are also wonderfully uncomplicated. A book doesn’t need wifi, login, a battery charge, or systems update.
These interruptions may seem small, but teachers know how quickly they accumulate. Three minutes here, five minutes there, and suddenly a meaningful portion of instructional time has disappeared. Sometimes good instructional design is simply removing unnecessary obstacles between the student and the learning.
Technology can provide simulations, multimedia, collaboration, immediate feedback, translation, text-to-speech and other accessibility tools that can transform learning. Those possibilities matter, particularly for students who depend on digital tools for equitable access. But reading three pages of ordinary text does not automatically become better learning because those pages appear on a screen.
If we genuinely want students to develop healthier relationships with technology, schools should provide meaningful opportunities to learn with it and without it.
I can seen the impact technology has had on the students I work with on a daily basis. When there is no tech available, students become noticeably restless, looking for something to doodle, squeeze, or toss. Waiting patiently and learning to live without distraction has become a new skill to teach. A physical book gives information a stable location. Students remember that the diagram was on the left-hand page or that the example they need appeared a few pages earlier. They can quickly move between sections without opening and closing windows. There is a physical geography to reading a book that scrolling and clicking does not entirely replicate.
Edwin is a valuable resource, and I am glad Ontario educators have access to it. But perhaps there is value in expanding our definition of a resource-rich classroom. Digital tools can open doors to perspectives, media, and information that were difficult to access in the past, while physical books can provide a sense of continuity, focus, and place. If we are to fully embrace a resource like Edwin, there has to be additional considerations for the amount of printing and photocopying that comes with it. Or, we could just offer the hard copy version, with the understanding that textbooks – like pens and notebooks – are consumable items that need to be replaced at regular intervals.
And yes, there is an environmental cost to purchasing books and photocopying. But if there is any good reason to use paper, surely it is for public education?
