Identity in Elementary School Social Studies Textbooks

The key role of education is to train knowledgeable and inquisitive people who in the face of complex situations, instability, and growing relativism in the present and future of the world, have the ability to critique and interact constructively with it. Accordingly, the course of Social Studies, based on the Monotheistic Naturalist Approach and its specific goals of cultivating active, thoughtful, exploratory, selective, free, and self-purifying individuals, especially in elementary school, plays a decisive role meanwhile. The idea of the present study to achieve the ultimate goals of this course is to focus on the concept of "identity" as one of the most fundamental concepts of the Monotheistic Naturalist Approach as well as the key concepts of the elementary school Social Studies textbook collection. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to provide a new model for teaching this course based on the macro concept of Identity. This research was conducted by qualitative content analysis method and its research population was elementary School Social Studies textbooks. As a result, in elementary school, Social Studies textbooks, the concepts of Individual Identity, Social Identity, Historical Identity, National Identity, Political Identity, Economic Identity, Civilized Identity, Religious Identity, and Cultural Identity are discussed in a distinct but heterogeneous manner and other types of Identity among the two important branches of Gender Identity and Digital Identity, in general, are ignored. In order to achieve the macro goals of the curriculum based on the Monotheistic Naturalistic Approach, the present study offers basic suggestions for compiling learning units based on the existing branches of the concept of Identity in the content of the mentioned books and the neglected ones.