Haeckel believed that the development of an embryo revealed the adult stages of the organism’s ancestors. Haeckel represented this idea with drawings of vertebrate embryos at similar developmental stages. This is Haeckel’s embryo grid, the most common of all illustrations in biology textbooks. Yet, Haeckel’s embryo grids are much more complex than any textbook explanation. I examined 240 high school biology textbooks, from 1907 to 2010, for embryo grids. I coded and categorized the grids according to accompanying discussion of (a) embryonic similarities (b) recapitulation, (c) common ancestors, and (d) evolution.
Biology textbooks are everybody's business. In accepting the view that texts are created with specific social goals in mind, I examined 127 twentieth-century high school biology textbooks for representations of animal development. Paragraphs and visual representations were coded and placed in one of four scientific literacy categories, including descriptive, investigative, nature of science, and HETS, or human embryos, technology, and society. I then interpreted how embryos and fetuses have been socially constructed for students. I also examined the use of Haeckel's embryo drawings to support recapitulation and evolutionary theory. Textbooks revealed that publications of Haeckel's drawings were influenced by evolutionists and anti-evolutionists in the 1930s, 1960s, and the 1990s. Haeckel's embryos continue to persist in textbooks because they 'safely' illustrate similarities between embryos and are rarely discussed in enough detail to understand the role of comparative embryology in the support of evolution.
However, there is limited support for teachers who wish to examine identity in ESOL textbooks. Several scholars attempted to evaluate the range of identity options offered in ESOL textbooks, but they all used either Critical Discourse Analysis or Content Analysis which can be effective; however, these procedures require training and can take a long time, so they may not be practical for teachers. This suggests that there is a need for a less complicated evaluation tool that can be easily used by teachers.
The purpose of this thesis is to develop a teacher-friendly identity-focused checklist for ESOL textbooks, and the thesis is guided by the following questions: (a) what would an evaluation checklist for identity in ESOL textbooks look like?; (b) what can this checklist reveal about ESOL textbooks? The purpose of this thesis was achieved by developing a qualitative checklist that covers, race, gender, social class, and speaker status, and demonstrating how to use it on a collection of five adult ESOL textbooks. The checklist revealed similarities and differences between the textbooks, including important shortcomings, and that kind of information can be useful for the teacher to make decisions about the textbook he/she uses.
TradeUp is primarily developed to cater to K-12 institutions. This means that a school would purchase a future commercial version of TradeUp. Once this is done a local database would be created in the school’s network and hosted on a server. This would allow for students to access the application by downloading it from the school’s website and would create a local network for the program to exclusively function in. This would allow for students in a school to trade textbooks amongst each other.
TradeUp is currently not available for purchase or for official use. The application is fully functional, and a version of the program can be downloaded in its totality from GitHub through the following link:
https://github.com/mgutie36/TradeUp
It is important to note that for the application to function on your laptop you must be utilizing a Windows machine. Furthermore, you must also utilize the create SQL statements found in “Create.txt” file located in the Bin/Debug folder of the solution in order to create a local database on your machine using Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. Once that is completed you must replace the connection string in the solution with the connection string that was just created on your machine.