This article explores the way in which children were portrayed and represented in relation to nature and society in social and natural sciences textbooks between 1965 and 1995 in Spain and Portugal. We focus on the depiction of childhood within these contexts and surroundings to discover the kind of relationship that was established between children and their environments and the ways in which their representations in nature and society changed over the course of the decades. Our specific empirical objectives are to discover where and how children were placed and portrayed and to identify patterns or predominant depictions of children in nature and society. The purpose of these objectives is to reflect on the ways in which textbooks transfer social representations of childhood and contribute to pupils’ self-perception and identity formation, as well as to identify differences and similarities between countries in this regard.
This article is part of a research project that examines the representations of nature and society in textbooks from Spain and Portugal in the last third of the twentieth century as well as the relationships between individuals and their environments. It is especially interesting to explore this phenomenon in countries with recently concluded industrialization processes; in societies that are transitioning to democracy; in young democracies; in countries that are experiencing processes of Europeanization that open borders; and in contexts of awakening international environmental awareness.
This study contributes to educational historiography and textbook research in several fields. First, it focuses on the representation of children as a category of analysis1 in textbooks, a topic that has been addressed by other researchers but that is carried out here with a focus on their depiction in specific contexts (nature and society). Christine Min Wotipka and colleagues’ cross-national and longitudinal analysis of the way in which school textbooks portray children as human beings with status and agency shows that in democratic countries children are portrayed as having rights and as social actors and that this trend evolves positively.2 In Greece, Ioannis Betsas and colleagues find that for many years “rural childhood was set as a model for the country's postwar reconstruction but it was then marginalised and represented as inferior compared to urban childhood, and from the 1980s onwards, it is vanished from the representations of Greek language textbooks.”3
In Spain, research on the representations of childhood has experienced an upswing in recent years and has been carried out from very diverse perspectives. We can find studies on the representations of childhood in comics4 or in children's advertising.5 Representations of childhood in Spanish textbooks focus on movement6 in early ages, on gender7 issues, or on the feeling of belonging to the family,8 but there has been no further in-depth research into either how much representation of childhood is incorporated into textbooks, or on the portrayal of children in relation to nature and society.
Studies of Portuguese textbooks for year four9 show that textbooks attempt to encourage positive behavior and to present the most relevant spaces for children (such as schools, houses, streets, and parks), portraying a very idealized vision of what life is like in the countryside. Adults and children are depicted with very stereotyped roles, while the child is represented as dependent on the adult, with no active voice.
The following question helps to clarify what makes our research different from previous studies in the area and how it adds a new approach to childhood studies in textbooks: where do Spain and Portugal, on their paths to building, consolidating, and maintaining democracy, place children physically and symbolically in textbooks within the context of their democratizing projects?
Second, our study addresses the impact of the spatial location of subjects as places of belonging and contexts of development, action, and interaction. We draw from the notion that the contents of textbooks not only provide knowledge about the reader's environments, but also influence the construction of a theoretical relationship with them, which is part of the child's processes of self-perception and identity construction. The study is therefore about the theoretical intersectionality that is created between the schoolchild and their environments, via their presence and representations in the textbooks. What and where are those natural and social spaces where children are portrayed?
Finally, our investigation engages with the power of the visual. The increasing paratextuality of textbooks, since the modernizing laws of education in the 1970s in Spain and 1980s in Portugal, includes images, and in particularly photography, as a paratextual element of the first order that requires its own reading and reflection. Non-textual language also requires decoding, contextualization, and interpretation.10 Are images of childhood clear, and do they constitute a substantial element in textbooks?
Theoretical Framework
Agustín Escolano Benito points out that “historical representations of childhood show empirically, through texts, icons and objects, how the school transforms the child into the pupil, and how this category, that of schoolchild, is a historical-cultural construction.”11 But are these schoolchildren only schoolchildren in textbooks? It is intriguing to see how and where they are made visible, whether they are actively or passively part of the social or political agenda for change, and whether they are allowed to see themselves in interaction with social and natural environments alike. We draw on studies of children's agency12 and studies that address their inherent and structural vulnerability.13Clarifying the framing of the social and the natural context is necessary because it turns out to be essential in the results of this research. Society and nature, as spaces of life and interaction, are complex and multidimensional. We refer here to social spaces created by humans, indoors and outdoors, such as schools, homes, supermarkets, and even playgrounds and gardens in the urban and rural worlds. Natural spaces are exclusively those not created by humans, including beaches, mountains, rivers, and lakes. Therefore, we distinguish between childhoods represented in urban and rural social landscapes and spaces, and in natural landscapes.
We believe these nuances are relevant because the years covered by our study are years that marked the beginning and consolidation of urban overpopulation, which led to a decrease in interaction with and knowledge of nature. In these years of multiple transitions and gradual rural depopulation, what emerged was the so-called “extinction of experience,”14 a term coined by Robert Michael Pyle as early as 1978 that influenced Richard Louv in his own concept of “nature attention disorder.”15 Along this line of thought, Henri Lefebvre stated in 1974 that “(physical) natural space is disappearing.”16 Furthermore, interaction with the natural environment was not only diminished by remoteness and distance, but also because natural space itself was reduced in reality and in textbooks. A photograph from a 1973 textbook illustrates two young native boys under the caption: “Still today, some Polynesian communities in the Pacific communities remain strongholds where man's [sic] life is spent in intimate contact with Nature.”17
Another conceptual nuance is also relevant. As Alfredo Tolón Becerra and Xavier Lastra Bravo have observed, “the legal definitions qualify as natural all those areas in which human intervention, in the past or in the present, has not significantly altered the presence and functioning of the other elements, abiotic and biotic, that make them up.”18 This means that most of the natural areas are seminatural. For empirical purposes, we focus on any space located in nature barely or not at all altered by humans.
There are two other reasons for inquiring about where exactly children are physically located. Jan Mason and Suzanne Hood state that “because of where children are located in society, they typically require adults to provide resources, such as funding or skill transfer,”19 and, as we shall see, this is precisely what textbooks display. Furthermore, contexts and locations are also physical and symbolic spaces of action. Landscapes have an impact on the shaping of national consciousness.20 The construction of an “imagined birthplace landscape” is linked to the construction of a national narrative and national identity.21 What kind of natural and social landscapes do textbooks display, as vital spaces of growth, development, interaction, and belonging, for the construction of an individual and collective identity and self-perception? The projection of these spaces where a person lives and interacts shapes their ideas of where they belong, where they can exist, and where their life has meaning.
All such issues are transmitted via textbooks that are increasingly composed of a multi-paratextual structure, in the sense that the number of paratextual units is increasing and the core text is decreasing. Paratextual units such as graphs, tables, maps and, above all, images in photographic format dominate the mode of transmitting information. The visual has been a constant subject of study ever since Rainer Riemenschneider formulated the question in his article about the relationship between images and texts in 1994.22 The whole amalgam of resources (textual and iconographic) that textbooks present in their pages constructs not only a hyperstructure but also a design where paratext abounds in its multiple forms.
Illustrations require their own decodification. The core of textbook knowledge is no longer found exclusively in the main text, and images carry a great discursive and cognitive value. We believe pictures convey meaning and knowledge, as well as data for identity and self-perception processes. The role of pictures and images is powerful, since they appeal to emotions, affect learners’ motivation and creativity,23 and transfer complex information, as is the case with the visual material in history textbooks, which “pupils interact with and which shape their experiences of the past and the present.”24 Falk Pingel already drew attention to the relevance of illustrations and the need to study them in detail in 2010, when he stated that “not only the text matters” and that “illustrations are more likely to foster deeply rooted prejudices; they help to create images in the minds of students, which are more persistent than the written text.”25 The prologue of one of the textbooks examined, signed by the editors, states that
the numerous inserted photos and the abundant color engravings are designed to visualize the contents of the book as much as possible and to expand the information in a way that is most accessible to the mentality of today's young people.26
Spanish and Portuguese Contexts: An Overview
Rural, Urban, and Natural Spaces
Spain had an urban population of 55.1 percent in 1970 and 62.6 percent27 in 1981, with an urbanization rate of 72.54 percent.28 Although, as Luis Camarero has observed, “the decade between 1955 and 1965 was characterized by rural exodus and urban transformation—in those years, Spain definitively left behind its agrarian and rural past to become urban and service-oriented”29—it was not until the mid-1980s that rural areas and rural populations entered the political agenda, at which point the term “rural” became associated with the concept of development.30 By the end of the 1980s, new visions of the rural environment broke down the idea of rural life as agrarian by definition.31
Portugal was predominantly rural in the 1960s and remained so until the mid-1970s.32 Between 1960 and 1981, population density in Portugal decreased in rural municipalities that since then have been depopulated, especially since the 1970s. The opposite happened in urban municipalities, especially around the metropolitan areas of Porto and Lisbon, the two major coastal cities, a situation that has caused many social problems.
The ecological movements for the conservation of nature and the preservation of biodiversity in the 1970s33 as well as the growing political interest in caring for the natural environment led to the enactment, in Spain, of Law 15/1975 of 2 May 1975 on protected natural areas and, in Portugal, of Law No. 9/1970 of 19 June 1970 on national parks and other types of reserves. The former established the categories of integral reserves of scientific interest, National Parks, and Natural Sites of National Interest.
(Inter)national Education Contexts and Children's Rights
Both countries participated in the Mediterranean Regional Project, which, according to Raymond Lyons, was
aimed at the drawing up of a planning framework for the allocation of resources to education in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Yugoslavia in relation to the requirements arising out of economic, demographic and social development up to 1975.34
Portugal and Spain experienced the same pressure for educational policy to respond to economic growth and development. In the 1960s, it became evident that it was necessary to promote greater literacy and qualification for the Spanish and Portuguese population. This led to the extension of compulsory schooling as well as to the reorganization of educational levels and curricula. Lyons observed that “at the elementary level compulsory education extends to 8 years in Italy, Spain and Yugoslavia, but 4, 5 and 6 years respectively in Portugal, Turkey and Greece.”35 Thus, during the 1970s and 1980s, the educational context was marked by the influence of international organizations and the human capital approach, later incorporating the principle of equal opportunities. Did the economy-oriented education context affect the representation of childhood in textbooks?
In the field of children's rights, almost every decade began with a new guideline that added more protection and recognition for children. These included, in 1959, the Declaration of the Rights of the Child; in 1979, the International Year of the Child designated by the United Nations General Assembly; and in 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, also designated by the United Nations General Assembly, which recognized the role of children as social, economic, political, civil, and cultural actors. Nature is not mentioned in the Convention, but Article 24 proclaims the need to take “into consideration the dangers and risks of environmental pollution” and
to ensure that all segments of society, in particular parents and children, are informed, have access to education and are supported in the use of, [and] basic knowledge of child health and nutrition, the advantages of breast-feeding, hygiene and environmental sanitation and the prevention of accidents.36
Similarly, Article 29 declares that “States Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to: . . . (e) the development of respect for the natural environment.”37 The discourse thus revolved around the protection of children in the face of evidence of environmental degradation. Are these developments alluded to in textbooks, and are children represented in the context of the new approaches to childhood?
Methodological Approach
Curricular Areas
For the Spanish case, we focused on the last three years of schooling, years six, seven, and eight (ages eleven to fourteen), and selected a sample of textbooks from the curricular areas of social and natural sciences. From the curricular perspective, Law 14/1970 of 4 August 197038 (General Law on Education and Financing of the Educational Reform)39 developed the contents analyzed in the “Social and Cultural” area40 as well as the area of “Natural Sciences.” The social and cultural area has a sub-area called “civic education.”41 With Organic Law 1/1990 of 3 October 1990 (on the General Organization of the Educational System),42 the educational levels were restructured. Thus, year six (now primary education) consolidates the areas into a single area called “Knowledge of the Natural, Social and Cultural Environment.”43 For years seven and eight, now included in compulsory secondary education, the areas were separated and called “Natural Sciences” and “Social Sciences, Geography and History.”44
In 1968, Portugal still included “History and Geography of Portugal” in the “National Spirit Formation” area. However, from 1972 onward the areas of “Human Sciences,” “Social Studies,” and “History of Portugal” were included in the so-called “Areas of Experience.” For Portugal, we have examined textbooks that were published for pupils in the years between primary and secondary education (ages ten to twelve). We chose to analyze textbooks related to the discipline of history or to those disciplines of social sciences that replaced history (history and geography of Portugal, history of Portugal and social studies) and natural sciences.
Textbook Selection and Empirical Approach
The first criterion for the selection of the textbooks was their representation of children. We bring to light the fact that there are many textbooks with no visual portrayal of children. The World and History (Mundo e Historia) by Federico Torres (1963) is an example of a textbook with no representation of children (despite this fact, the textbook won a prize for best historical reading book for schools). The same is true of Social Studies: First Preparatory Year (Estudos Sociais. 1º ano Ensino Preparatório), which was published in two volumes by Maria Luísa Guerra and Amílcar Patrício in 1978. Another criterion was the textbooks’ focus on natural and social sciences, whereby we examined the curricular areas described in the preceding section. Our third criterion was the publishing house. We considered eight well-known publishers for Spain and six for Portugal; this allowed us to broaden the sample by accounting for the variety of textual production that was occurring at the time.45
The first differentiation we made with respect to images of childhood was between drawing and photography, and we discarded all those images in which the representation of a child or children is not clearly identified. We considered the number of pages of each textbook in order to evaluate the number of images with children in relation to the total number of pages (that is, how much exposure to the childhood imaginary is provided by a given number of pages). The quantitative count included a qualitative one, from which the classifications of representation emerged.
Results and Discussion
The examination of the thirty-six textbooks led us to review a total of 7,783 pages. Table 1 shows how we identified 247 drawings of children and 274 photographs, indicating, overall, a scarce visual depiction of childhood (only 6.69 percent with respect to the total number of pages). From the comparative perspective, we found a certain balance between the use of photography and drawing. This finding, however, needs to be analyzed more closely, since there are several textbooks with only photographs and three textbooks with few drawings and no photographs (a Spanish textbook from the 1960s and two from Portugal from the 1980s and 1990s). There is also a greater number of images in the books from Spain (n = 307), which, however, in relation to the number of pages, turns out to be almost the same in both countries (6.8 percent for Portugal and 6.62 percent for Spain). The most significant difference is in the degree of the representation of children in nature, which is higher in the Portuguese textbooks (1.2 percent) than in the Spanish textbooks (0.73 percent). In the remaining representations, children are depicted in non-natural spaces, outdoors (streets), and indoors (kitchens, living rooms, classrooms, school playgrounds, churches, and unidentified sanitary spaces).
Quantitative global data on pages and images (© the authors).
| TBs | Pages | Images of children | Total images | Children in nature | Children as victims | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drawings | Photos | no. | percent* | no. | percent** | no. | percent** | |||
| Portugal | 17 | 3,147 | 106 | 108 | 214 | 6.80% | 38 | 17.75% | 16 | 7.47% |
| Spain | 19 | 4,636 | 141 | 166 | 307 | 6.62% | 34 | 11.07% | 45 | 14.65% |
| Total | 36 | 7,783 | 247 | 274 | 521 | 6.69% | 72 | 13.81% | 61 | 11.70% |
* percentage with respect to total number of pages
** percentage with respect to total number of images
These localizations of children led us to the following classification.
Family dependency, love, protection, and belonging (babies, families at home)
School and secondary socialization (pupils at school, children playing together, classrooms, playgrounds, parks)
Other childhood depictions (royalty, poverty, workers, other countries, other historical times, Industrial Revolution)
Children as victims of wars, immigration, and exploitation (immigrant families with suitcases, children working)
Environmental awareness (children recycling).
We include the quantification of the most striking category: children as victims of wars, immigration, and exploitation. Some of these categories overlap, as other depictions of childhood include child workers (whom we consider victims); similarly, child victims of war or poverty also appear accompanied by their mothers in images projecting security and protection.
A closer look at the data throws relevant light on the differences between the textbooks in terms of the decades and countries in which they were published.
The important qualitative improvement in the number of representations of children in the textbooks of both countries, starting from the late 1960s and early 1970s, was clearly a result of the new technological publishing processes. Yet during the 1990s, there was no extraordinary increase in the frequency of occurrence (of childhood) in textbooks. Table 2 shows that the increase in the number of images over the decades was gradual, moving up 8.34 points from 1.54 percent in the 1960s to 9.88 percent in the 1990s for Portugal, and 5.39 points from 4.74 percent in the 1960s to 10.14 percent in the 1990s for Spain.
Images of children from the 1960s to the 1990s (© the authors).
| TBs | Pages/ decade | Images of children | Total images | Children in nature | Children as victims | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drawings | Photos | no. | percent* | no. | percent* | no. | percent* | ||||
| Portugal | 1960s | 3 | 647 | 7 | 3 | 10 | 1.54% | 2 | 0.30% | 0 | – |
| 1970s | 5 | 861 | 28 | 48 | 76 | 8.82% | 10 | 1.16% | 7 | 0.81% | |
| 1980s | 6 | 941 | 33 | 26 | 59 | 6.26% | 18 | 1.91% | 8 | 0.85% | |
| 1990s | 3 | 698 | 38 | 31 | 69 | 9.88% | 8 | 1.14% | 1 | 0.14% | |
| Total | 17 | 3,147 | 106 | 108 | 214 | 6.80% | 38 | 1.20% | 16 | 0.50% | |
| Spain | 1960s | 3 | 526 | 9 | 16 | 25 | 4.75% | 2 | 0.38% | 2 | 0.38% |
| 1970s | 4 | 1.231 | 43 | 30 | 73 | 5.93% | 15 | 1.21% | 1 | 0.08% | |
| 1980s | 8 | 2.100 | 52 | 78 | 130 | 6.19% | 11 | 0.52% | 39 | 1.85% | |
| 1990s | 4 | 779 | 37 | 42 | 79 | 10.14% | 6 | 0.77% | 3 | 0.38% | |
| Total | 19 | 4,636 | 141 | 166 | 307 | 6.62% | 34 | 0.73% | 45 | 0.97% | |
* percentage with respect to total number of pages
Although the trend is upward and the numerical jump in the 1990s is evident, the percentage of images is still low. Visibility of childhood in nature clearly stands out in the 1970s in Spain. This can be explained by the onset of political and educational change and increasing international influences. However, in Portugal this increase in visibility occurred in the 1980s. The explanation could be found in the fact that from the late 1970s the curricular areas of “Social Studies” and “Natural Sciences” contained rubrics about “man and his idleness” and the relevance of nature for the survival and well-being of humanity. While Portugal maintained a certain stability in terms of its representation of the presence of children in nature in the 1970s and 1990s, the visualization of children in nature in Spanish textbooks from the 1980s and 1990s was very poor. The number of images of children in nature did not follow the same upward pattern as the number of general images over the decades.
The frequency of the representation of children as victims is striking in the case of Spain in the 1980s (1.85 percent). The explanation may be that these were the years of social democracy. This, however, contrasts with a lower representation of children as victims in Portugal, with the highest value also in the 1980s (0.85 percent). Yet, surprisingly, the total number of images of children as victims over the course of these four decades (0.97 percent) exceeds the number of images of children depicted in nature in the case of Spain (0.73 percent), while Portuguese textbooks evidence a low representation of children as victims (0.5 percent) and a higher representation of children in nature (1.2 percent).
Fortunate and Fragile: Dependency, Love, and Protection
The two recurrent settings for representations of children in the textbooks from both countries are that of the family and the social group. Children are depicted with their families in ordinary situations (praying, at home, in parks, crossing the road) as well as in critical situations (immigration, war, poverty). Their status as sons and daughters stands out.
In line with Escolano's statement cited at the beginning of this article, another predominant image is that of the child as a schoolchild, socializing (always peacefully) in social urban contexts and in green areas such as parks. Secondary socialization takes place at school, on playgrounds, at church, and in the streets in the form of peer interaction.
Pupils encounter pictures of children fitting “comfortably into an ever-improving materialistic middle-class life,” and “families thus exist as groups of people living together” because of loving bonds. Most “family situations presented include both a father and a mother,”46 and there is plenty of “meaningful children-adult interaction,” but not one selection addresses “family problems realistically.”47 Even rural family scenes evoke a sense of protection and family ties.
Textbooks project an image of children who are happy, nurtured, and fortunate to have families, homes, friends, and education (as dictated by United Nations guidelines). The other side of the coin is their non-dealized representation as dependent, fragile, and vulnerable individuals (from the perspective of Gerison Lansdown's inherent vulnerability48) in need of family and social protection, which is provided for them. Babies (particularly with parents) are shown in textbooks from all decades.
While it is true that images of happy childhoods among family and friends predominate, this is not the full picture conveyed by the textbooks. We perceive as well a harsh, realistic depiction common to urban and rural environments. Both contexts and spaces also potentially entail discomfort and danger for children, yet the family emerges as loving, caring, and protective. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate two family scenes in the street. The first one, from 1969, shows the precarious conditions of the environment in a Portuguese rural context, and the second (an image from 1980 in Spain that was reprinted in the 1983 edition) illustrates the situation of poverty caused by unemployment. The note reads: “Help me, fellow workers. I have been unemployed for eight months without insurance.”
Rural street family scene in Portugal.
Fernandes et al., História e Geografia de Portugal (Year two), 162.
Citation: Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 16, 1; 10.3167/jemms.2024.160106
Urban street family scene in Spain.
Mañero Monedo et al., Ciencias Sociales, 339.
Citation: Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 16, 1; 10.3167/jemms.2024.160106
The photo from the Portuguese textbook reads, “How the Portuguese live in rural areas.”49 The Spanish textbook is linked to a caption that reads, “The problem of unemployment, typical of the capitalist system, affects human dignity and minimum human rights.”50
In the 1990s, the status of children remained unchanged in terms of their care and protection. However, new images of children in front of computers and recycling emerged as a novelty.
Unfortunate Childhoods
Following the approach outlined above regarding the vulnerability of children, we find that textbooks from the 1970s in Portugal and the 1980s in Spain contain a complex historical depiction of childhood as non-idyllic and as posing dangers and challenges for children all over the world, not exclusively for Spain and Portugal. This classification outperforms in terms of appearance the representation of children in nature in the respective decades (see Table 1).
While Africa is the continent most frequently featured with “unfortunate” children, photographs portray childhoods from other societies as well (China, Palestine), as well as immigrants. It could be argued that this finding is congruent with the contents of the curricular area, since developing countries are addressed in the Spanish 1970 General Law on Education and in the Portuguese curricular area called “Social Studies” (Estudos Sociais) from 1975, which proposed to analyze themes related to housing, free time, and children's rights.
In addition to poverty, immigration, and war, images of children working in the Industrial Revolution in Spain51 and in rural contexts are frequent. The former are represented via paintings and engravings, as is the case with the painting of child “hurriers” working in mines, which bears the caption “The inhumanity of the first industrial revolution. Children working in the mines. The freedom to hire labor allowed employers to exploit women and children for low wages and backbreaking hours in order to achieve maximum profitability.”52 Joan Planella's The Weaver (La teixidora, 1882) depicts a young girl operating a mechanical loom in a Catalan textile factory. This picture is shared by two textbooks from different publishing houses. SM adds the following caption: “The work of the children served as a complement to the work of the adult or the machine itself. In the photo: a weaver in a Catalan textile factory.”53
Other examples of art that make children visible, found in textbooks from the 1980s and 1990s, are Eugène Delacroix's “Le Massacre de Chios”, and Daumier's painting entitled The Third-Class Carriage (Le wagon de troisième classe). Their inclusion is used to illustrate the movements of romanticism, realism and social criticism in art. The category of the child as a victim is multidimensional, and some of the images are captivating, as illustrated by Figures 3 and 4. These types of photographs match the one encountered by Ñurit Peled-Elhanan in her study of the representation of Palestine in Israeli textbooks. She claims that
Sad child.
Mañero Monedo et al., Ciencias Sociales, 226.
Citation: Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 16, 1; 10.3167/jemms.2024.160106
Working child.
Amaral and Barreira, Minha Gente, 184.
Citation: Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 16, 1; 10.3167/jemms.2024.160106
the only close shot of a Palestinian in the books studied here is a photograph of Palestinian refugee children in Jordan, presented in the pulped school book World of Changes: one girl looks directly into the camera and hence into our eyes.54
Figure 3, from a 1983 Spanish textbook, is inserted in a set of photos illustrating “social problems and the Third World,” and the caption reads,
The cities are choked by pollution and are no longer fit for life. Many children grow up sad, helpless, hungry for bread and affection. Meanwhile, the leaders of our world meet to discuss, ineffectively, in this great empty hall of the UN. Will we men know how to free ourselves from our selfish quarrels and build a better world?55
Figure 4, from a 1979 Portuguese textbook, illustrates a working child.56 The last topic addressed in the curricular area of “Social Studies” was titled “Man and His Idleness.” Finally, with regard to the topic of free time, we find mention of how, in the 1960s and 1970s, some rural children had to work to support their families.
The relevance of these striking photos is evidenced by the insertion of the famous photo by Kyōichi Sawada of a Vietnamese mother and her children wading across a river to escape US bombing,57 which was taken in 1965 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in 1966. The images of other children as victims diminish in the textbooks of the 1990s, except for images pertaining to Africa and immigration.
Natural Spaces and Environmental Awareness
When it comes to nature, the beach and the countryside are the purest natural spaces where children are found and depicted. Children are portrayed in a recreational relationship with the coastal environment and the countryside in search of well-being in healthy natural spaces where family and social relationships take place. Leisure, health, and social interaction are the three factors associated with the placement of children in nature. Figures 5 (Portugal) and 6 (Spain) illustrate two representative examples of children depicted in nature.
Children at the beach in Angola.
Cristo and Cristo, O sol, a terra e a vida, 28.
Citation: Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 16, 1; 10.3167/jemms.2024.160106
Children in the countryside in Spain.
Equipo Aula 3, Bóveda (Year six), 19.
Citation: Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 16, 1; 10.3167/jemms.2024.160106
The photograph in the Portuguese textbook has been inserted to illustrate the theme of the difference in temperatures between Portugal and Angola in December,58 and the photo from the Spanish textbook illustrates a scene of neighbors socializing. The caption reads, “A large coexistence group: our neighborhood. In the illustration, children from the youth group of a neighborhood association at a picnic.”59 This type of image is not intended to make the reader think about nature as an environment where childhood is inscribed beyond the promotion of leisure, health, or socialization. These images are taken in nature, but they do not allude to the need to care for, to appreciate, or to recognize nature as a vital environment to which the children depicted belong as individuals. Furthermore, the location of childhood is restricted to two natural spaces, namely, the countryside and the sea (or parks), mostly without reference to the geographical location. Hardly any images depict childhood in rivers, streams, mountains, forests, canyons, caves, lagoons, wetlands, or waterfalls, which are part of the broad and rich natural scenery of both countries, even though, at the time, school excursions were common and mass tourism had existed since the 1970s.
It could be also stated that the textbooks lack more visual information on “the natural environment in the process of destruction,” included explicitly as knowledge content in the 1971 “New Pedagogical Guidelines” for the second cycle of the Basic General Education program (Enseñanza General Básica, EGB). Likewise, there is scant reference to the “valuation of the environment, natural and social, as a framework for human coexistence” and to the “defense of the natural environment: air, land, water.” Captions such as “The conservation of Nature as an obligation of all. Man as an agent of degradation”60 or calls to defend “the natural environment by avoiding the creation of hazards”61 are not accompanied with images that include children in such actions, except for in a very few specific examples.
Conclusion
Textbooks from Spain and Portugal published during the years encompassed in this study are not child-inclusive. Children are underrepresented in both quantity and quality, and we hardly encounter photographs that illustrate them explicitly in society and nature in a rich and proactive manner.
One of the explanations that can be put forward for the underrepresentation of children is that, in line with the context, the authors’ aim was to represent the professional world, including work, the workforce, and productive activities. This objective focuses on the presence of working adults (men and some women) as well as industries and factories. The representational pattern is similar in both countries, and the differences are essentially in the absence of striking pictures of sad, starving children and of royalty in Portuguese textbooks. From this perspective, our study raises the issue of the explicit visibility of children in textbooks.
In keeping with the social and demographic context of the time, the results show a clear predominance of representations of children in the social urban space (primarily homes and schools) but also in social rural spaces, with families and friends. This makes sense considering that migratory movements to the city took place in the 1950s and 1960s, and that by the 1970s and 1980s urbanization processes had been concluded in Spain and were well advanced in Portugal, with a very small number of children remaining in the countryside.62
The fact that children are more heavily represented in social urban contexts has several implications. It describes a dual reality: the situation itself and its consequences. The textbooks analyzed contribute to the construction of a sociocultural and urban identity to the detriment of the environmental one, understood as an identity that promotes coexistence and connectedness with nature.63 Although this approach to identity emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century, these textbooks are not even in line with the environmental social movements and policies of the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, as dictated by the curriculum, they portray “the humanized landscape of our world.”64 Social urban space becomes the natural setting for children, where they may see themselves in action and with their interests taken into account.
The underrepresentation of nature itself in these textbooks results in an inexistent theoretical intersectionality, a mental gap that distances them from the natural world. If “shallow contact with nature leads to shallow solutions for conservation,”65 so does poor superficial knowledge and visual representation. This distancing and absence of connection and bonding hinder the generation of affective, cognitive, and behavioral attitudes toward nature together with an environmental identity. Still today there is a claim for the urgency “to enhance both connection to nature and varying forms of ecological knowledge, especially in cities, to safeguard the delivery of the multitude of cultural ecosystem services associated with nature.”66 The disappearance of natural spaces, of unspoiled nature, and the scarce inclusion of children in seminatural spaces, even in textbooks, contributes to erasing nature, which fades away not only from memory, but also from the mind and thought, from their own self-perception. This is due to the fact that “vicarious and passive learning environments”67 and educational media grow at the expense of real experiences.
In addition to the vision of leisure and the enjoyment of natural spaces and urban nature, the textbooks also reflect the anthropocentric view of nature via the few portrayals of children on beaches and in the countryside, gardens, and parks. The natural world (plants, soil, animals, minerals, and water) is still considered to have a utilitarian value for human well-being and development, including their health. Although the textbooks contain some content on environmental conservation and care, they reflect an anthropocentric paradigm. They teach children to perceive themselves as users and consumers of nature. These social urban and rural spaces are depicted by these textbooks as the norm, and so these books can be said to depict “specific spatial competence and performance”68 in reduced, socially produced spaces.
Children are indeed depicted as “rights bearers,” with the rights they hold including the right to enjoy the environment, but not as “actors capable of involvement in local, national, and global contexts.”69 The images display the child as “becoming,” as an “adult in the making,” who lacks the universal skills and features of the “adult” that they will become, much more than they portray the former as “a social actor in his or her own right, who is actively constructing his or her own childhood.”70 Children seem to be human beings that will be, rather than human beings that are, except with regard to their dependency and vulnerability.
It is possible to perceive the essence of the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child in the phrases “The child shall enjoy special protection”; “the benefits of social security”; “shall have the right to adequate nutrition, housing, recreation and medical services”; “grow up in the care and under the responsibility of his parents, and, in any case, in an atmosphere of affection”; and “is entitled to receive education, shall have full opportunity for play and recreation.”71 The representation of children as a vulnerable group with rights that is in need of protection as outlined in United Nations declaration predominates over their representation as possible (future) actors in the processes of democratic consolidation in each Iberian country. Environmental discourses, however, continue to have a limited impact and visibility in these textbooks, a fact reflected in the dearth of images portraying children in natural settings.
The textbooks that were looked at failed to foster an image of children as strong, confident, and active in their social and natural environments. While the texts call upon them to do and comply, this is not backed up by the reinforcing role of the images deployed. The textbooks place them in nature and society as happy spectators and passive recipients of rights and of a given reality, rather than as actors and promoters of civic transformation and progress. They expose pupils to a poor and reduced spatial scenario with images that are born of a static social imaginary that shapes children's representations of themselves as well as their social and natural environments.
We believe that the projection of past and less fortunate childhoods, even if they are examples from other countries, can teach us a lot about other realities and lived experiences. However, we also note the scarce representation of negative socioeconomic realities such as unemployment and social exclusion, which also negatively affect children.
Many textbook photographs from the years encompassed by our study are of poor quality, although they do improve in the 1990s. They also increase in number and size as the years go by. In the 1990s, however, many photographs are not spatially contextualized, and they often merely locate children on the page without any specific purpose. “The ability of images to encode large amounts of information economically” and to serve an “integrating function”72 was not exploited with visual aids in this phase of editorial design, neither in terms of their inclusion in the design of the pages nor in terms of the selection of spaces. The textbooks thus fail to portray a more active, participatory childhood interacting with nature and society.
We discovered that in a process of profound change, democratic construction and consolidation, children were not sufficiently portrayed in a more active role or in a wide variety of natural and social spaces. The textbooks fail to convey the message that children are part of the democratic and participatory project during its transition, consolidation, and solid development, and that they will be counted on as future democratic citizens and not only as recipients of rights and care.
Notes
Studies of other categories of analysis in textbooks include John R. Sahli, “The Slavery Issue in Early Geography Textbooks,” History of Education Quarterly 3, no. 3 (1963): 153–158, doi:10.2307/367278; Annie Chiponda and Johan Wassermann, “Women in History Textbooks: What Message Does This Send to the Youth?,” Yesterday and Today 6 (2011): 13–25, https://scielo.org.za/scielo.php?pid=S2223-03862011000100006&script=sci_abstract; and Muhammad Ayaz Naseem, Adeela Arshad Ayaz, and Jesús Rodríguez Rodríguez, eds., Representation of Minorities in Textbooks: International Comparative Perspectives (Santiago de Compostela: IARTEM, 2016).
See Christine Min Wotipka, Joseph Svec, Lisa You, and Francisco O. Ramirez, “The Status and Agency of Children in School Textbooks, 1970–2012: A Cross-national Analysis, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 53, no. 6 (2021): 949–966, doi:10.1080/03057925.2021.1976621.
Ioannis Betsas, Sofia Avgitidou, and Anastasia Tsiompanou, “Representations of Childhood in Greek Language School Textbooks: From Rural to Urban Childhood,” Paedagogica Historica 57, no. 6 (2021): 675–694, here 693, doi:10.1080/00309230.2020.1762678.
Marta Agüero Guerra, Representaciones de la infancia en el cómic: de la nostalgia al compromiso social [Representations of childhood in comics: From nostalgia to social commitment] (León: Universidad de León, 2022).
Alfonso Méndiz Noguero, “La representación del menor en la publicidad infantil: De la inocencia a la sexualización” [The representation of minors in children's advertising: From innocence to sexualization], Methaodos. Revista De Ciencias Sociales 6, no. 1 (2018): 125–137, doi:10.17502/m.rcs.v6i1.231.
Vladimir Martínez Bello, “La relación infancia-movimiento en los libros de texto del segundo ciclo de educación infantil” [The relationship between childhood and movement in textbooks for the second cycle of early childhood education], Revista Actualidades Investigativas en Educación 14, no. 2 (2014): 1–20, https://www.scielo.sa.cr/pdf/aie/v14n2/a18v14n2.pdf.
Ana Maria Candelas Rodríguez Teixeira, “Infancia, espacios y roles de género en la Enciclopedia Álvarez (1953–1971)” [Childhood, spaces and gender roles in the Álvarez Encyclopedia], Studia Zamorensia 20 (2021): 35–45, https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=8882444.
Ana Sebastián Vicente, “Vision of the Family and Childhood in the First Reading Books for Neo-literate Adults of the Franco Regime,” in La infancia en la historia: espacios y representaciones 2 [Childhood in history: Spaces and representations 2], ed. Luis María Naya Garmendia and Paulí Dávila Balsera (San Sebastián: Erein, 2005), 176–185. Ana Sebastián's research delves into the representations of childhood in reading books for adults that emerged from Franco's literacy campaigns in the 1950s. These books showed childhood subordinated to the concept of the traditional family, thus denying the individuality of the child.
Teresa Castro and Rui Ramos, “Configurações da infância em textos de manuais escolares” [Childhood configurations in textbook texts], Currículo sem Fronteiras 21, no. 2, (2021): 817–834, https://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/bitstream/1822/74234/1/Castro-Ramos%202021.pdf; Teresa Castro and Rui Ramos, “Representações da infância no manual escolar em Portugal” [Representations of childhood in Portuguese textbooks], Revista Científica Vozes dos Vales 3, no. 6 (2014): 1–32, https://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/bitstream/1822/30734/1/Representa%c3%a7%c3%b5es-da-inf%c3%a2ncia-no-manual-escolar-em-Portugal.pdf.
James H. Mathewson, “Visual-Spatial Thinking: An Aspect of Science Overlooked by Educators,” Science Education 83 (1999): 33–54, doi:10.1002/(SICI)1098-237X(199901)83:1%3C33::AID-SCE2%3E3.0.CO;2-Z.
Agustín Escolano Benito, “La escuela como construcción cultural: El giro etnográfico en la historiografía de la escuela” [The school as a cultural construction: The ethnographic turn in school historiography], Espacios en Blanco: Revista de Educación 18 (2008): 131–146, here 141, https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/3845/384539800006.pdf.
Jan Mason and Suzanne Hood, “Exploring Issues of Children as Actors in Social Research,” Children and Youth Services Review 33, no. 4 (2011): 490–495, doi:10.1016/j.childyouth.2010.05.011.
Gerison Lansdown, “Children's Rights,” in Children's Childhoods: Observed and Experienced, ed. Berry Mayall (London: Routledge, 1994), 33–44.
Robert Michael Pyle, “The Extinction of Experience,” Horticulture 56 (1978): 64–67.
Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2005).
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, [1974] 1991), 30.
Abad et al., Consultor, 23.
Alfredo Tolón Becerra and Xavier Lastra Bravo, “Los espacios naturales protegidos. Concepto, evolución y situación actual en España” [Protected natural areas: Concept, evolution and current situation in Spain], M+A. Revista Electrónic@ de Medioambiente 5 (2008): 1–25, here 2, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/27595144_Los_espacios_naturales_protegidos_Concepto_evolucion_y_situacion_actual_en_Espana.
Mason and Hood, “Exploring Issues of Children,” 494.
Tali Tadmor-Shimony, “Shaping Landscape Identity in Jewish State Education during the 1950s to 1960s,” Paedagogica Historica 49, no. 2 (2013): 236–252, doi:10.1080/00309230.2011.633925.
Ibid., 237.
See Rainer Riemenschneider, “Bild und Text: eine problematische Symbiose?” [Image and text: A problematic symbiosis?], Internationale Schulbuchforschung 16, no. 4 (1994), 393–395, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43056018; Carsten Heinze and Eva Matthes, eds., Das Bild im Schulbuch [The image in textbooks] (Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt, 2010); Karin Priem and Inés Dussel, “The Visual in Histories of Education,” Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 6 (2017): 641–649, doi:10.1080/00309230.2017.1392582; and Mischa Gabowitsch and Anna Topolska, “Visual Literacy in History Education,” Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society 15, no. 1 (2023): 1–19, doi:10.3167/jemms.2023.150101.
Sara Kasmaienezhadfard, Masoumeh Pourrajab, and Mohtaram Rabbani, “Effects of Pictures in Textbooks on Students’ Creativity,” Multi Disciplinary Edu Global Quest (Quarterly) 4, no. 2 (2015): 83–96, here 84.
Gabowitsch and Topolska, “Visual Literacy,” 8.
Falk Pingel, UNESCO Guidebook on Textbook Research and Textbook Revision (Paris: UNESCO, 2010), 48–49.
José Legorburu, Geografía Elemental [Elementary geography] (Madrid: SM, 1962), 4.
Jacinto Rodríguez Osuna, “Proceso de urbanización y desarrollo económico en España” [Urbanization process and economic development in Spain], Ciudad y Territorio Estudios Territoriales 55 (1983): 25–42, here 27, https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/CyTET/article/view/81706.
José María Serrano Martínez, “Crecimiento de la población urbana española y complejidad del modelo de organización de su red urbana. Interpretación de los cambios producidos durante los últimos decenios” [Growth of the Spanish urban population and complexity of the organization model of its urban network: Interpretation of the changes produced during the last decades], Papeles de Geografía 28 (1998): 145–164, here 152, https://revistas.um.es/geografia/article/view/45461.
Luis Camarero, ed., La población rural de España: De los desequilibrios a la sostenibilidad social [The rural population of Spain: From imbalances to social sustainability] (Barcelona: Fundación la Caixa, 2009), 30.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 19.
António Barreto, “Portugal, um retrato social. Gente Diferente—episódio 1” [Portugal, a social portrait: Different people—episode 1], filmed by Joana Pontes, produced by Rui Branquinho, music by Rodrigo Leão, 2007, 1:01:59, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZNdGlTn9XA; Pordata—Base de Dados de Portugal Contemporâneo, Estatísticas sobre Portugal e Europa [Pordata—Database of contemporary Portugal, statistics on Portugal and Europe]. Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, https://www.pordata.pt/db/municipios/ambiente+de+consulta/tabela.
Alfonso Mulero Mendigorri, “Territorio y áreas protegidas en España y Portugal: dos modelos de intervención en una geografía compartida” [Territory and protected areas in Spain and Portugal: Two models of intervention in a shared geography], Boletín de la Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles 74 (2017): 205–227, https://bage.age-geografia.es/ojs/index.php/bage/article/view/2452.
Raymond Lyons, “The OECD Mediterranean Regional Project,” The American Economist 8, no. 2 (1964/1965): 11–22, here 12, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25602628.
Ibid., 17.
United Nations, Commission on Human Rights, Forty-fifth session, Agenda item 13 E/CN.4/1989/29/Rev. 1, page 11.
Ibid., 13.
Ley 14/1970, de 4 de Agosto, General de Educación y Financiamiento de la Reforma Educativa (LGE).
The law prescribed an eight-year Basic General Education program (Enseñanza General Básica, EGB). The curriculum was then elaborated in the “Pedagogical Guidelines” (Orientaciones Pedagógicas) published in Vida Escolar 124–126 (1970): 1–155. A year later, the curriculum changed slightly and was published again in the same journal, issues 128–130.
In 1971, the name of the area is reduced to the “Social” area, eliminating “Cultural.”
Later, the area was renamed several times as “Civic-Social Education” (1974), “Education for Coexistence” (1976), and “Ethical and Civic Education” (1978).
Ley Orgánica 1/1990, de 3 de octubre, de Ordenación General del Sistema Educativo (LOGSE).
Ibid., 28931.
Ibid., 28932.
Miguel Beas Miranda and Soledad Montes Moreno, “El boom de la edición escolar. Producción, comercio y consumo de libros de enseñanza” [The school publishing boom: Production, trade, and consumption of educational books], in Historia ilustrada del libro escolar en España: De la posguerra a la reforma educativa [Illustrated history of the schoolbook in Spain: From the postwar period to the educational reform], ed. Agustín Escolano Benito (Madrid: Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, 1998), 73–101, here 96–98. For Portugal, the publisher of eight textbooks, Porto Editora, is still predominant today in the publishing market.
There is almost no depiction of the elderly as grandparents.
There are, however, clear differences between our findings and Harro Van Brummelen's study, “The Role of Textbooks in Inducting Children into Society,” Journal of Educational Thought / Revue de la Pensée Éducative 24 (3A) (1990): 135–137, here 136, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23768207.
Gerison Lansdown, “Children's Rights,” in Children's Childhoods Observed and Experienced, ed. Berry Mayall (London: Routledge, 1994), 33-44.
Fernandes et al., História e Geografia de Portugal (Year two), 162.
Mañero Monedo et al., Ciencias Sociales, 37 (“Ethics and Civic Education” section annexed to the textbook with new pagination), 339.
Portugal did not include the industrial revolution in the syllabus.
Mañero et al., Ciencias Sociales, 51.
Fernández and García, Mundo y Sociedad, 32; Equipo Aula 3, Bóveda (Year eight), 54.
Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education (New York: I.B. TAURIS, 2012), 78.
Mañero Monedo et al., Ciencias Sociales, 266, 267.
Amaral and Barreira, Minha Gente, 184.
Abad et al., Consultor, 183.
Cristo and Cristo, O sol, a terra e a vida, 28.
Equipo Aula 3, Bóveda (Year 6), 19.
Nuevos contenidos de las Orientaciones Pedagógicas del área social de la segunda etapa de EGB, Educación para la Ciudadanía, 1976. Orden de 29 de noviembre de 1976 por la que se establecen nuevos contenidos provisionales en las orientaciones pedagógicas del área social en la segunda etapa de la EGB [New contents of the Pedagogical Guidelines of the social area of the second stage of BGE, Education for Citizenship, 1976. Order of 29 November 1976, establishing new provisional contents in the Pedagogical Guidelines of the social area in the second cycle of BGE].
Orden de 25 de noviembre de 1982 por la que se regulan las enseñanzas del Ciclo Superior de la EGB [Order of 25 November 1982, regulating the teaching of the higher cycle of BGE].
In the Greek context, this has been explained as “a vicious cycle of degradation and devaluation of the rural compared to the urban” by Betsas et al., “Representations of Childhood,” 19.
Susan Clayton and Susan Opotow, eds., Identity and the Natural Environment: The Psychological Significance of Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
Orientaciones Pedagógicas, 108.
Robert Michael Pyle, “Nature Matrix: Reconnecting People and Nature,” Oryx 37, no. 2 (2003): 206–214, here 207, doi:10.1017/S0030605303000383.
Danielle Bashan, Agathe Colléony, and Assaf Shwartz, “Urban versus Rural? The Effects of Residential Status on Species Identification Skills and Connection to Nature,” People and Nature 3, no. 7 (2021): 347–358, here 335, doi:10.1002/pan3.10176.
Mathewson, “Visual-Spatial Thinking,” 43.
Ibid., 38.
Wotipka et al., “The Status and Agency of Children.”
Emma Uprichard, “Children as ‘Being and Becomings’: Children, Childhood and Temporality,” Children & Society 22, no. 4 (2008): 303–313, here 304, doi:10.1111/j.1099-0860.2007.00110.x.
United Nations, General Assembly. Fourteenth Session, 841st plenary meeting, 1386 (XIV). Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 20 November 1959.
Mathewson, “Visual-Spatial Thinking,” 44.
Textbook Bibliography
Spain
Abad, Julián, Enrique Centeno, . . . . and José María Parra. Consultor: Ciencias Sociales 7º [Consultant: Social sciences. Year seven]. Madrid: Santillana, 1973.
Albacete, Juan, Javier Cuenca, and José María Parra. Sociedad 80: Ciencias Sociales 8º [Society 80: Social sciences. Year eight]. Madrid: Santillana, 1981.
Casajuana, Rosabel, Eduard Cruells, . . . , and Carles Viver Pi-Sunyer. Medio natural, social y cultural 6º [Cultural, social and natural environment. Year six]. Madrid: Vicens Vives, 1995.
Castejón, Pablo, José Luis Díez, and Jaime Mascaró. Sociedad 8: Educación General Básica [Society: Basic general education. Year eight]. Madrid: Santillana, 1985.
Castejón, Pablo, José Luis Díez, and Jaime Mascaró. Sociedad 8: Educación General Básica [Society: Basic general education. Year eight]. Madrid: Santillana, 1989.
Cuesta, Raimundo, Guillermo Castán, and Manuel Fernández. Proyecto Cronos: Ciencias Sociales, Historia y Geografía. Segundo ciclo de la ESO. Barreras físicas, fronteras humanas [Cronos project: Social sciences, history, and geography. Second cycle of compulsory secondary education. Physical barriers, human borders]. Madrid: Ediciones de la Torre, 1995.
Dobers, J., K. H. Grothe, . . . , and J. Tirado. Ciencias de la Naturaleza 8º [Natural sciences. Year eight]. Madrid: Interduc S.A., 1979.
Equipo Aula 3. Bóveda: Ciencias Sociales, 6º [Vault: Social sciences. Year six]. Madrid: Anaya, 1985.
Equipo Aula 3. Bóveda: Ciencias Sociales, 8º [Vault: Social sciences. Year eight]. Madrid: Anaya, 1985.
Fernández, Juan José, and Gabriel García. Mundo y Sociedad 8º [World and society. Year eight]. Madrid: Ediciones SM, 1981.
Gosálbez, Alfredo. Educación cívico-social 6º [Civic-social education. Year six]. Madrid: Doncel, 1969.
Hernández, M. del Carmen, and Juan José Visquert. Conocimiento del medio 6 [Knowledge of the environment. Year 6]. Madrid: Anaya, 1999.
Legorburu, José. Geografía elemental [Elementary geography]. Madrid: Ediciones SM, 1962.
Legorburu, Pedro, and Gabino Larrutia. Ciencias Naturales: Bachillerato superior 5º año [Natural sciences: Higher baccalaureate. Year five]. Madrid: Ediciones SM, 1968.
Mañero Monedo, Mariano, Domingo J. Sánchez Zurro, and Isidoro González Gallego. Ciencias Sociales 8 EGB [Social sciences for basic general education. Year eight]. Madrid: Anaya, 1980 and 1983.
Ramos, Antonio, Jaime Mascaró, Felipe Hernando, and Teresa Grence. Sociedad 8º [Society. Year eight]. Madrid, Santillana-Grazalema, 1993.
Rivera, Juan José, Jesús C. Guiñales, and Santiago Alonso. Ciencias de la Naturaleza 6º [Natural sciences. Year six]. Madrid: Ediciones SM, 1975.
Vadillo, Emilio, Enrique Sánchez, Alberto De la Cruz, and Jaime Mascaró. Naturaleza 6 [Nature. Year six]. Madrid: Santillana, 1983.
Valls, Juan. Libro de consulta: Ciencias de la Naturaleza, 6º [Consultation book: Natural sciences. Year six]. Barcelona: S.A. Casals, 1973.
Portugal
Alves, Luísa Maria Ferreira, Maria dos Anjos Rodrigues Tomaz, and Maria da Conceição Sousa Farraia. Ciências da Natureza: 5º ano. Vou Descobrir porquê [Natural sciences: Year five. I'll find out why]. Lisbon: Texto Editora, 1992.
Amaral, Maria da Conceição, and Aníbal Barreira. Minha Gente, meu País: Estudos Sociais / 1º Ano do Ensino Preparatório [My people, my country: Social studies / 1st year of preparatory education]. Porto: Edições ASA, 1979.
Botelho, Magda Moscoso, Catarina Peralta Leal Loureiro, and Júlio Leal Loureiro. Ciências da Natureza: Ciclo Preparatório. 2º ano [Natural sciences: Preparatory cycle. Year two]. Porto: Porto Editora, 1977.
Carvalho, Rómulo de. Ciências da Natureza, 1: Para o 1º ano do Ciclo Preparatório do Ensino Secundário [Natural sciences, 1: For the 1st year of the preparatory cycle of secondary education]. Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa Editora, [1962] 1970.
Costa, Fátima, and Antonio Marques. Estudos Sociais: 1º Ano do Ciclo Preparatório. País, Região, Localidade, Escola [Social studies: 1st year of the preparatory cycle. Country, region, location, school]. Porto: Porto Editora, 1979.
Costa, Fátima, and Antonio Marques. História e Geografia de Portugal: 6º ano de escolaridade [History and geography of Portugal. Year six of schooling]. Porto: Porto Editora, 1994.
Cristo, Maria Isabel Anaia, and José Carlos Anaia Cristo. O sol, a terra e a vida: Ciências da Natureza—Ciclo Preparatório do Ensino Secundário. 1º ano [The sun, the earth, and life: Natural sciences—preparatory cycle of secondary education. Year one]. Porto: Lello, 1970.
Duarte, Mário Veríssimo. Compêndio de Ciências Geográfico-Naturais para o 1º ano do Ciclo Preparatório do Ensino Profissional Industrial e Comercial [Compendium of geographical-natural sciences for the 1st year of the preparatory cycle of industrial and commercial professional education]. Porto: Porto Editora, 1967.
Fernandes, Maria da Graça Lameiras, Manuela Lobo da Costa Simões, and Gustavo de Freitas. História e Geografia de Portugal: Para o 2º ano do Ciclo Preparatório do Ensino Secundário [History and geography of Portugal: For the 2nd year of the preparatory cycle of secondary education]. Porto: Porto Editora, 1969.
Lasbarrères, Eva, Noémia Félix, and Vítor Henriques. Estudos Sociais. Portugal—a terra e o povo. 1º Ano E.P. [Social studies. Portugal—the land and the people. 1st year preparatory education]. Lisbon: Texto Editora, 1984.
Leite, Carlinda, Ofélia Dias, and Rosalina Pereira. À descoberta da terra: Ciências da natureza 5º ano de escolaridade [The discovery of the land: Natural sciences. Year five of schooling]. Porto: Edições ASA, 1986.
Lopes, Ilídio Altino Vaz. Caderno de Estudo de Ciências da Natureza: 1º ano do Ciclo Preparatório do Ensino Secundário [Notebook of study of natural sciences: Year one of the preparatory cycle of secondary education]. Porto: Livraria Avis, 1969.
Martinho, Ana, Isabel Alçada, and Maria do Céu Roldão. Portugal Estudos Sociais: 1º Ano E.P. [Portugal social studies: Year one preparatory education]. Lisbon: Texto Editora, 1986.
Meireles, Maria Helena Pinto. Ciências Sociais 1: 7º ano de escolaridade (1º ano do curso secundário unificado) [Social sciences 1: Year seven of schooling (1st year of the unified secondary course)]. Porto: Porto Editora, 1981.
Moreira, Maria Hermínia Antunes de A., and Marina F. Rodrigues Moutinho. Ciências da natureza: 5º ano de escolaridade. Ensino Preparatório [Natural sciences. Year five of schooling. Preparatory education]. Porto: Porto Editora, 1981.
Peralta, Catarina Rosa, and Maria Beleza Calhau. Investigar e aprender a terra: Ciências da natureza. 5º ano [Investigate and learn the land: Natural sciences. Year five]. Porto: Porto Editora, 1990.
Roldão, Maria do Céu, and Olinda Costa. Estudos Sociais [Social studies]. Lisbon: Texto, Lda., 1981.
