ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the main features that characterize the textbook as a cultural artifact. The semiotic analysis intersects notions of Lotman and Bakhtin, with a review of different contexts. The main objective of the research was to investigate how the textbook participates in the generation of culture, building national identities, defining who are foreign to our cultural space, creating ideologies and mentalities and imposing meanings. The study shows that the active reception of the social agents involved in decoding can create new meanings, different from official texts and that generating messages and codes should be viewed dialectically.
KEYWORDS:
school textbooks; culture; ideology; mentalities; semiotic