Values and identities in Iranian primary school social studies textbooks: a discursive approach

ABSTRACT

Textbooks provide the most serious source of knowledge construction and transmission for children at schools. This paper used a discursive and qualitative content analysis approach to extract the dominant values, ideologies and identities in four social studies textbooks taught nationwide to children in primary schools in Iran. Textual and visual analysis were applied on these textbooks and the results showed the saliency of four dominant discourses and values including pre-Islamic ethos and Iranian-Islamic identity, war and peace, social and traditional values in Iranian culture, and respect for diversity. Each of these discourses are discussed and some recommendations are made at the end of the paper to better situate the significance of these values in school textbooks.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse
• identities
• qualitative content analysis
• social studies
• values

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially funded by the Research Department at Sharif University of Technology.

Notes on contributors

Saeed Rezaei

Saeed Rezaei is an Associate Professor of TESOL and Applied Linguistics at the Languages and Linguistics Center, Sharif university of Technology, Tehran, Iran. His main areas of research are in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. His most recent publications have appeared in TESOL Quarterly, Open Learning, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Asian Englishes, Journal of Multilingua, Teaching and Teacher Education, New Writing, and Springer Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Homepage: http://sina.sharif.edu/~srezaei

Satoshi Abe

Satoshi Abe has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Arizona. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Kyushu University but before that he taught and did research in different universities including Nagasaki University and Kobe University. He has mainly done fieldwork research in Iran regarding the state and religious discourse on environmentalism in Iran.

Afsaneh Farhang

Afsaneh Farhang got her MA from the Languages and Linguistics Center, Sharif university of Technology, Tehran, Iran.