episteme

Based on the grounds giving form to teachers' professional identity in Iran's educational system, the present study aims to provide a framework to portray, with a power-based approach, the various kinds of professional identity which can be perceived for Iranian teachers. For this purpose, narratives were collected and the discourses were analyzed, which led to different kinds of issues regarding teachers' professional identity, all of which pointed out the influence of power in the creation of identity. Then, in order to organize the findings in accordance with an established theory, Michel Foucault's views and his approach to critical discourse analysis were used. Using documentary analysis, an episteme-like two-dimensional matrix was devised as a framework to display the various possible identities for teachers in the context of Iranian education. One dimension represents the elements constituting the powers residing over teachers' professional performance, while the other dimension depicts the different reactions teachers showed to these elements of power. When these dimensions meet, possibilities arise, each of which can symbolize teachers' identity. Therefore, the different kinds of identity systematically placed in the matrix-like framework of "power like protection" can be regarded as the main findings of this study, which can prove useful when it comes to explaining the range of changes in teachers' identity based on changes in power relations.

The notion of culture has been discussed in modern science, but there is no discussion on the cultural issues because modern science claims neutrality. In this article, we show definitions of the concepts of episteme and paradigm, then we show change of paradigm is the cause of episteme changing. We introduce the three significant paradigms of the antique, modern, and post-modern eras and use them to introduce the corresponding epistemes which are "self-centrism", "altruism" and "virtual reality", respectively. In this manuscript, we also will see that cultural issue is a result of thinking contradiction which happens when a paradigm changes more quickly than episteme. This contradictory thinking is a consequence of incompatible mixing of old episteme and new paradigm which can be found in the new civilizational instruments. We show that thinking contradiction causes a kind of self-alienation. Finally, we conclude that the first step to finding a solution for the cultural problems is to recognize this contradiction. Explaining the philosophy of cultural issues is crucial to confront social abnormalities.