An Investigation into the Type and Amount of Representation of Intended Values of Iran's National Curriculum Document in Vision Series

In today's world, we are witnessing a resurge of interest of formal schooling systems in what has come to be termed as Values Education. Part of this interest emanates from the emphasis laid by contemporary discourses, especially those around sustainable development, on the inclusion of commitment-oriented values in the educational arena and abiding by them. In keeping with this, by extracting policy-makers' intended values as reflected in such macro policy texts as Iran's National Curriculum Document, the present qualitative study set out to unpack the type and amount of such a reflection of values in secondary schools' English textbooks Vision Series. To this end, and subsequent to the identification of the said document's intended values, having employed the content analytical method, it sought to scrutinize all the clauses of the total set of six textbooks (three student books and three workbooks) in an attempt to lay bare to what extent and how, if any, the values had been represented and foregrounded/backgrounded. It was found, among other things, that personal growth, community-based, health/hygiene-related, and environmental/ecological values, respectively, had the highest frequencies through the provision of pictorial as well as linguistic contexts. Along similar lines, in terms of representational patterns, values such as work/labor-related, religious, nationalist, and aesthetic ones had been poorly reflected in the textbooks. The study is liable to have implications for the major educational stakeholders, including teachers, the series compilers, and educational policy-makers.