The Role of Visual Tools in the Process of Teaching and Learning History: An Analysis of Croatian Humanistic Secondary School History Textbooks

Abstract

Despite the inclusion of various media in the teaching process, textbooks remain an important tool in the education process. One of the reasons behind this is that textbooks represent the starting point of structuring, organising and directing the teaching and learning process. The question of whether or not a particular textbook fulfils the aforementioned roles can be ascertained through, first and foremost, analysing its didactic-methodological conception. The didactic-methodological conception of a textbook is determined based on a specific textbook instrumentarium and the set didactic-methodological criteria of its planning. One of the largest instrumentaria of every textbook is its visual tools. Hence, the attention of this paper is to specify desirable didactic-methodological criteria of visual tool presentation in textbooks. Using this criteria, the main aim is to detect which of the visual tools are represented in the Croatian humanistic secondary school’s history textbooks, to determine whether they fulfil their potential roles in the process of teaching and learning history, as well as to ascertain whether there are any differences in terms of the aforementioned between the Croatian humanistic secondary school history textbooks which teachers choose most often and the ones they choose the least.