You Don't See Me, I Won't See You!-Teaching History in Iran under the Islamic Republic

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Teacher agency, internationalization, and higher education

Proposal

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, growing scholarly debates have criticized the theocratic State for its authoritative imposition of a singular historical narrative in education and beyond. Pointing to the way the Islamic Republic has ideologically selected and appropriated a nation's history to sanction particular identities, these debates have overwhelmingly focused on the power of the State at the expense of marginalizing the role of social actors such as teachers as the mediator of the curriculum.
Drawing on an extensive ethnographic research in Tehran-Iran, this paper brings to light teachers' significant yet over-looked power to resist the State's narrative at this important juncture in the country's history. It discusses the instructional choices and discourses of history teachers and shows how they, de-facto subvert the official history. By telling their story, this paper then demonstrates that despite real constraints, teachers do act against the imposition of official history and trivialize the State's theocratic authority through quiet and unassuming acts of everyday resistance.

In addition to the contribution to Iran-specific debates (and the Middle East more broadly), the significance of the case studies is that, they reveal the limitations in our existing conceptualization of teacher agency in authoritarian fields. By assuming universal criteria, mediums and forms, the current frameworks neglect the power of alternative forms of power, which take place in non-democratic contexts. This paper argues that, although small and seemingly inconsequential - teachers' instructional practices and discourses are in fact acts of resistance; an alternative form of agency that the existing conceptualization falls short to recognize.

Author

• Yasamin Alkhansa, University of Sussex,