Pictures of the School Books and Their Relation to National and Religious Identity Study of First and Second Grade Books

This paper aims to examine the national and religious components of the identity in first and second elementary school text books 2010-2011. In this study books of first and second grades of elementary school totally including over 875 visual pages, have been studied using the descriptive and analytical method, employing techniques such as observation, library study and interview with the experts and managers. Information obtained from review of the pictures were analyzed and classified into seven categories including "coordinated visual elements", "neutral elements", "contrasting elements" and combinations of these three categories. The findings show that there is a lack of balanced attention to the elements and components of religious and national identity in the studying books and even though proper images in some pages have been faded away and lost their influence by positioning beside contrasting and neutral elements. There were 93 coordinated pages versus 592 neutral and 19 contrasting pages. It can be concluded that religious and identical concepts are conveyed obviously weak in the pictures of these books.