Low-End Group Discussion Guidebooks and Kunjis

Abstract

In contemplating Group Discussion guidebooks I am a bit undecided about whether these should be regarded as textbooks (i.e. whether guidebooks are a subset of textbooks) or whether these are distinctively guidebooks. Textbooks could be thought of as presenting an existing area of knowledge in an organized fashion, predominantly for the institutional purposes of learning and teaching (for education at some level). The emphasis is on outlining an area of received knowledge, on conveying a sense of what that area consists in. And yet, straightforward as this appears, defining textbooks remains a slippery business. Textbooks involve not merely reflection of existing knowledge but also a particular sort of reconstruction of that knowledge. An earnest attempt at theorizing textbooks puts the matter thus: The definitional issues are acute and revealing because textbooks themselves lay a definitional claim to the knowledge they contain — they claim that “this is certain knowledge and this is the knowledge you need”. Embedded in textbooks therefore is a foundational epistemological assumption — that they have a status, a bona fide status with a potential for universal application.(Issitt 2004, p.685) This implicit claim is one of authority which derives from, so to speak, digested knowledge mapped and laid out.