Learning at Intercultural Intersections

This paper deconstructs the 2004 and earlier editions of Iranian school textbooks for how official knowledge about the ideal Iranian citizen, Africa, Asia, and the Americas is represented. I focus on four main educational themes of identity politics, diversity, citizenship, and development. I maintain that despite the revolutionary and anti-imperialist ideology that informs school knowledge and the revision of the textbooks based on theories of, for example, Global Education, they do not offer holistic, emancipatory, and inclusive accounts of diversity despite. I argue that school knowledge differentiates between groups and nations through the invocation of racialized, nation-centric, and xenophobic discourses. I highlight the various forms of absent and present discourses and categories of otherness that are employed in simultaneously constructing an image of the ideal citizen and national identity that ends up dominating and erasing these multiple forms of global otherness. I conclude that Iranian “Citizenship education” is not based on a de-colonizing knowledge since in teaching about “citizenship” obligations, hegemonic Orientalist, anti-colonial, revolutionary, and Persian-centric conceptions of us and them distinctions are (re)appropriated and reconstituted in highly problematic ways to teach about Iran in relation to the world.