While Tavakolian's work is featured in many Western publications, it is not always intended for a Western audience. In her speech to the seventh biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art, she used an old family photo to demonstrate how photography helps to build collective memory. Believing this framework to be largely missing in her…

This article aims to identify and compare the characteristics of human agency in liberal and Islamic religious education, comparing Iran as a religious context influenced by Islamic state ideology with Finland as a liberal context and a secular state ideology. This comparison will be accomplished by document analysis of the national curricula for…

Teachers' work in Iran has undergone two determining changes since 1979: The Islamicisation of the education system and, consequently, Islamic teacher education, with neoliberal policies, has accelerated in recent years. The authors believe Islamicisation has been integrated into neoliberal policies and together these have shaped teachers'…

This study of the rise and fall of nature schools across Iran in 2014-2019 shows the environmental and educational context of modernization during and before the Iranian Islamic Republic commenced in 1979. The account provides the historical and cultural context for understanding the nature school movement. Ecologist Hossein Vahabzadeh's…

This study examines policies of English language teacher recruitment in Iran as part of broader education policies reflected in official national documents, and briefly investigates the implementation of these policies in selected educational institutions. Seven major documents are scrutinised using qualitative content analysis revealing three…

The present study aimed to provide a conceptual model of cultural policy-making in Payame Noor universities in District 8 based on piety and virtue. In this study, the components of cultural policy based on piety were first identified through exploratory studies and surveys of knowledge-aware experts using the Delphi technique, and then these…

Middle East Region is home to more than 400 million people, representing 5% of world population, and boasts a workforce of 103 million scattered across 22 countries (Lord, 2016). Sixty five percent of the populations are young aged 25 or under, which puts growing stress on educational, health and social systems. Over the last decade, most Middle…

This article has two aims. First, it is concerned with a discourse in British media and politics of "Muslim education", a concept that often appears alongside words such as "extremism" and "radicalisation" and contributes to the undue "religification" of people of Muslim backgrounds. I offer a preliminary…

The present qualitative study sought to explore the relationship between English language learning and identity reconstruction from the viewpoints of Iranian language learners. The data were collected by means of focus-group interviews with forty-five male intermediate learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). To define the concept of…

Three decades have passed since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and, entering the fourth decade, major changes are apparent in the structure and content of the nation's education system. Because of the victory of the Islamic Revolution of Iran and the regime change and formation of an Islamic state, the changes in the educational…

One of the significant achievements of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the increasing access of women to all levels of education. This paper focuses on women's access to higher education and its unexpected and paradoxical outcomes. Today women in Iran represent over 60% of university students at the undergraduate level. Against the dominant…

The construction of social identity is an interdisciplinary term, which is a favourite topic for many scholars worldwide. Religion and identity are intertwined regarding the concept of identity construction. In Iran, this relation can best be seen through English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks. To achieve this, this study investigates the…

Islamic fundamentalism is an extreme perception of Islam that views "the 'Other' as the enemy demonized" against the "West", which also views the Muslim "enemy within". In contrast, pluralism perceives 'others' as different people, with different values from us. While the fundamentalist seeks to engage in war with the…

This paper is a report on an experimental study which intended to look into the possible effects of Competitive Team-Based Learning (CTBL) vis-à-vis Group Investigation (GI) method of Cooperative Learning (CL) on the language proficiency of Iranian EFL intermediate students. Seventy homogeneous Iranian intermediate students were selected out of a…

The internal/external frame of reference (I/E) model and dimensional comparison theory posit paradoxical relations between achievement (ACH) and self-concept (SC) in mathematics (M) and verbal (V) domains; ACH in each domain positively affects SC in the matching domain (e.g., MACH to MSC) but negatively in the nonmatching domain (e.g., MACH to…