2.4 The Work: Revising for Inclusion

As a revising author of a textbook, you have your work cut out for you. The genre of textbook writing has a long history of being racist and exclusionary. As Charles W. Mills writes in The Racial Contract, “standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by Whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination.”^[1] Textbooks have often legitimatized certain kinds of knowledge while marginalizing others. You have an opportunity to challenge this history and offer a different pathway to understanding.

Explicit and Implicit Bias in Textbooks

Explicit bias in a textbook is easy to spot. It may involve the use of stereotypical examples or incorrect/dated terms to describe someone’s race, ethnicity, gender, economic status, and so forth. Explicit bias in textbooks can be pointed out on the page.

Implicit bias can be harder to spot in a textbook because it is based on what’s not on the page. It might be implied through tone. It might be a lack of discussion of scholars of color or an over-emphasis on “the greats” (who just happen to all be White and male). It might be found at the sentence level, with references to “men and women,” rendering invisible readers who don’t identify as either.

For more descriptions of biases found in textbooks and curricular material, explore Seven Forms of Bias in Instructional Materials from the Myra Sadker Foundation [Website].

Red Flags in Textbook Writing

Bias can be subtle and difficult to recognize, especially in your own writing. As an instructional editor, I have identified what I call “textbook mode” as one of the brightest red flags for biased writing. Textbook mode is a default style of writing that is easy for many academic writers to reproduce because you’ve spent so much of your career reading dense, dry, and demanding scholarly work.

Inclusive revision requires the creative application of empathy to the written text. This is your opportunity to put yourself in the reader’s place and imagine the text from their position. To approach your revision with an equity lens, look for opportunities to reinforce the principles of accountability, specificity, precision, and humanity. We’ll take a closer look at these principles on the next page.