This research project aims to carry out a comparative study of the way in which school textbooks in Primary and Secondary Education have dealt sociocultural contents in the period of the LOGSE Law (a Spanish educational reform passed in 1990). The fundamental objective of this investigation would therefore focus on the manner in which school textbooks transmit sociocultural concepts, employing for this purpose a representative sample of those which were used in the Basque Country, from 1992 until 2006, when the new Organic Law of Education (LOE) was approved. The second phase of the project will be developed next year; the books used in that period will be compared with those used nowadays, so as to see the changes that the new Law has brought about. The textbook is the link between the official curriculum and the teacher. As Apple (1996a, 24) states “these are the devices which make up the real curriculum at most schools”. According to Apple (1996b, 66), “they are the expression of specific constructions of reality, of particular ways of selecting and organising the vast universe of potential knowledge. They embody human vision with respect to what may be considered legitimate in terms of knowledge and culture”. Moreover, since ideology reflects the conflict between different groups, the identity of different groups, power struggles etc., to paraphrase Van Dijk (1996, 9-49), it could be said that the concepts, values, opinions and lexical or iconographic contents of textbooks are used to build social models. We have studied iconography and written text for the following three reasons: because textbooks use a combination of both to explain their contents, because the iconic and linguistic codes are interpreted together, and finally because they make up a single context. We have observed that the choice of where and how contents are specified is extremely important. In the first phase of this project, we have focused on the sociocultural contents. In the next phases we will analyze and compare the contents related to Europe and to the State.

We have analyzed 51 books, published in Basque and in Spanish. Those published between 1990 and 2006 are of particular importance to us, because it gives us the chance to draw comparisons with data up to the year 1990, and define contents which have been updated. Combining quantitative and qualitative methodology we have created a computerized tool to excerpt terms and facilitate the statistic treatment of the data. We have described each icon and we have analyzed the connection between icons´ content and the text through six variables. With the help of statistics, we have made use of the contingency tables and the analysis of variance.

Historically speaking, the presence of the curriculum content has had two different tendencies: the hegemonic and the sociocultural. Both traditions can be found in textbooks, but the hegemonic tradition is predominant over the sociocultural tradition, both in quantity and in quality. In the textbooks we have analyzed, the sociocultural contents related to the Basque Country appear less often than those related to the State. The next step will be to analyze how the new education law will be determined, to see the direction of the coherence among curriculum levels.