Representation of Components of National Identity in Elementary School Textbooks

M.Sharepour^[1]

M. R.SoleimaniBesheli^[2]

A.Shokrolahi^[3]

Abstract

School textbooks as written documents are the center of education in centralized educational systems. The educational practices and experiences are organized based on the textbooks. As a result, the best designs, and content elements need to be employed in the writing and compilation of the textbooks. School is a mechanism by which children are introduced into the political life. Political orientations which are taught during the early schooling have important impact on people political behavior. Although school is known as the most important means for political socialization, not much research has been done in Iran about the various elements of schooling including the textbooks. The main aim of the present paper is to employ the content analysis to investigate the content of elementary textbooks in terms of frequency and salience of national identity. In doing so, the comparisons were made among different components of national identity in terms of frequency and importance coefficients. The findings revealed that among all literature textbooks at elementary level, geography has least importance coefficient while cultural heritage enjoys the highest level of importance coefficient.

Keywords: Textbook, national identity, content analysis, social identity, political socialization, cultural heritage.