Role-Playing and the Future of the Textbook

Using their ValleySim and A Marriage of Cultures simulations as e-textbook prototypes, the authors explore four experiential subject positions or roles that textbooks of the future can create for students: student as reader, student as performer, student as author, and student as collaborator. Textbooks rooted in the epistemological traditions of print-based culture have traditionally permitted only one of these four roles for students: the passive reader. The authors argue that digital culture, which reflects an amalgam of oral and print societies, creates an opening for students to play central roles within textbook narratives while still retaining an unalterable narrative foundation rooted in a knowledgeable scholarly voice. The authors contend that e-textbook publishers who offer students active and creative roles within future textbook narratives will be able to maintain the value of textbooks as repositories of foundational content while offering students more empowering subject positions from which to access, probe, and extend textbook material.