Laudation on the Occasion of the Award of the Arsen-Djurović-Prize 2017
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Prof. Dr. Eva Matthes, Lehrstuhl für Pädagogik,
Universität Augsburg
Vorsitzende der Internationalen Gesellschaft
für historische und systematische
Schulbuch- und Bildungsmedienforschung e.V. (IGSBi)
Laudation
on the Occasion of the Award of the
Arsen-Djurović-Prize for Historical Research on Textbooks
to Dr. Kira Mahamud Angulo for
the following publications from the years 2014, 2016 und 2017:
1) Contexts, Texts, and Representativeness: a Methodological Approach to School Text-
books Research. In: Knecht, Petr/Matthes, Eva/Schütze, Sylvia/Aamotsbakken, Bente
(Eds.): Methodologie und Methoden der Schulbuch- und Lehrmittelforschung / Meth-
odology and Methods of Research on Textbooks and Educational Media. Bad Heil-
brunn: Klinkhardt 2014, pp. 31–49.
2) Emotional Indoctrination through Sentimental Narrative in Spanish Primary Education
Textbooks during the Franco Dictatorship (1939–1959). In: History of Education. Journal
of the History of Education Society 45 (2016), Issue 5, pp. 653–678.
3) Teaching Economics with Spanish Primary School Textbooks during the Franco Dicta-
torship and the Transition to Democracy (1962–1982) (with Yovana Hernández Laina).
In: Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 9 (2017), pp. 71–99.
Dr. Kira Mahamud is Lecturer at the Department of Historical and Comparative Educational
Science at the Faculty for Educational Science at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a
Distancia (Distance University) in Madrid, affiliated to which is MANES, a Research Center
for Instructional Educational Media. Kira Mahamud’s main fields of research are history of
education with a focus on the time of the Franco Regime and the transition to democracy,
but also studies regarding culture, language, emotion, educational politics, and gender. In
the field of research on educational media her focus lies on primers, here also especially
from the Franco period, and on the role of educational media in phases of transition from
dictatorship to democracy.
In her doctoral thesis from the year 2012,
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Kira Mahamud Angulo dealt with the emotional
content of textbooks for primary schools in the first phase of the Franco Dictatorship
(1939–1959); she showed by which means the textbook authors – more or less subtly –
tried to convince the pupils of the solicitousness and the singularity of Franco and his re-
gime. Thus, the children were seduced and became seemingly voluntary followers of the
system.
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Adoctrinamiento emocional y socialización política en el primer Franquismo (1939–1959):
emociones y sentimientos en los manuales escolares de enseñanza primaria [Emotional
Indoctrination and Political Socialization in the First Phase of the Franco Dictatorship
(1939–1959). Emotions and Sentiments in Textbooks for Primary Schools]. Madrid: Univer-
sidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia 2012.
Laudation on the Occasion of the Award of the Arsen-Djurović-Prize 2017
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Kira Mahamud has pursued this issue in further publications and has also taken it as a start-
ing point for substantial methodological reflections. From this resulted the following rele-
vant text, which is the first one on which the decision for the award draws upon:
„Contexts, Textual Units, and Representativeness“ (2014) gives a multifaceted survey of
methodological approaches for multi-perspective textbook analyses. Using the example of
her own research Kira Mahamud conveys an exemplary, but nevertheless generalizable
overview of essential and indispensable research approaches. To this end, she differenti-
ates between perspectives “from the outside” and “from the inside”: On the one hand, it is
about contextualization – with regard to production, use, and impact –, and on the other
hand, it is about the textbook itself as macro-text with multimodal units, with their rele-
vant special languages, and the discourses and narratives within. Thus, Kira Mahamud
opens a wide spectrum of inter- and intra-textual research aspects and issues. In view of
this task, she finally asks how representativeness can be achieved – with regard to the con-
textualizing sources as well as with regard to the research corpus itself.
As second text, the article “Emotional Indoctrination …” (2016) stands in the focus of the
award, which updates results from Kira Mahamud’s doctoral thesis from 2012, mentioned
above, and which highlights the prominence and relevance attached by the Franco dicta-
torial regime to emotions and sentiments in primary education textbooks. The authors of
school textbooks employed a singular writing style, which enabled them to permeate the
regime’s ideology within the primary education community and classroom. Overcoming
the censorship of their textbooks lent the authors a measure of authority derived from the
government, increasing the schoolbook’s relevance as the instructional resource par excel-
lence. The sentimental narrative, reinforced by figurative, pseudo-poetic language and
precise instructions on how and what to feel, represents prescriptive texts and reveals the
objective of emotionally homogenizing and indoctrinating the children in order to social-
ize them politically and religiously, molding their socio-political self and identity within the
pattern established.
The third text for the Prize, “Teaching Economics …” (2017), leads into the middle of Kira
Mahamud’s actual and important research, regarding the change of content and design of
textbooks in the context of socio-political transformation processes, especially the transi-
tion from dictatorial to democratic systems, and here concretely: the transition from the
Franco Dictatorship to democracy. Based on the assumption that the field of economics
serves as a central basis of legitimation for political systems, the article looks into 23 text-
books for Social Studies and reading books for students at the age of 11 to 14, and exam-
ines the depiction of the economical situation and the challenges for the country, begin-
ning in the 1940s with a focus from the 1960s to the 1980s. According to her methodologi-
cal principles, which have already been mentioned with regard to her first contribution,
Mahamud – together with her co-author Yovana Hernández Laina – resorts to further
sources in order to contextualize the analyzed textbooks, among them educational direc-
tives, economic development plans, and pedagogical journals. Furthermore, the relevant
texts and figures in the wisely selected textbooks are studied with regard to intertextual
and intratextual references. The results show the developments in the Franco era and at its
end, with an increasing depiction of economic issues at the end of the dictatorship and
during the transition to democracy; they are characterized by an optimistic way of presen-
tation, omitting all problems and emphasizing stories of success. This shows continuity;
however, in a few textbooks from the democratic Spain, one finds also critical texts,
sources, and assignments, which expound the fundamental problems of the capitalist
economic system.