Andrew Phelan Internship

This week of my internship for the Catholic Textbook Project was much more fast-paced and involved than the weeks prior. Now that the first draft has returned from historical and design reviewers, the process of creating the next draft starts from the beginning by revising every aspect of the previous draft with the detailed feedback left by historians and educators.

To begin the week I sat-in on a few of the zoom meetings where the members of the team along with my supervisor Mrs. Sabrina Magnusson discussed the overarching critiques and the plan moving forward. The biggest topic of discussion was on flow and digestibility to the young readers. Because the audience of the textbook is 3rd and 4th graders, it is vital that the language used is both appropriate for their grade level as well as rigorous enough to be beneficial to their education. It has been emphasized multiple times throughout my time on this project that these stories cannot be overly simplified or “dumbed-down” at the expense of historical accuracy. This is what creates the struggle at the core of this project and makes it clear to me why so few curriculum’s feature this style of historical education. The Catholic Textbook Project wants to combat that trend, though, and is continuing to find the balance that makes complex historical figures intriguing and pays them respect through an accurate telling of their story.

During my cold read it was especially difficult to look for issues like these. It is hard to put yourself in the mind of a young person who has never heard of Joan of Arc or Muhammad and try to read it like it is the first time. While I am not a part of making the actual changes to fix these problems, being able to be present in the meetings and hear what issues the historians had and how the team planned to fix them was incredibly fascinating.

The other key issue that need revision and actually fell into a task I could do was the choice of images throughout the timeline. A few weeks back I submitted a selection of images that were fair use that could be used in the book to represent historical figures along the timeline which stretches across the entire textbook. Once my work and a few others’ suggestions were put together to make the draft some of our images presented problems. The images that we used would sometimes be unrecognizable at such a small scale or their coloration was difficult to see against the backdrop of the page. During my initial search for images I had taken these into consideration, but it is hard to understand the scale of the image on the page before actually seeing it on there. For the rest of the week I went back through the book with the notes on the images and recompiled a list of possible replacement images.