Analyzing the Components of Multicultural Education in Hediye-Haye Aseman (Gifts of Heaven) Textbooks in Elementary School Based on the Criteria of Philosophy for Children Curriculum

The present study was conducted with the aim of analyzing the components of multicultural education in Hediye-Haye Aseman textbooks in elementary school based on the criteria of Philosophy for Children Curriculum.

The research method was descriptive and quantitative content analysis, with Shannon’s entropy technique. Due to the limitations of the society, the sampling was total and included 5 volumes of Hediye-Haye Aseman textbooks for the second to sixth grades in the academic year of 2022-2023. The units of analysis included text, images and book activities. The research tool was a researcher-made checklist including the components of multicultural education and philosophical thinking criteria (exploratory, argumentative and interactive), the validity of which was confirmed by the CVR method; and to ensure reliability with re-implementation, the agreement coefficient 87% was obtained.

The findings showed that the components were reflected in the textbooks 45 times in total, and the concept of "disability" with a coefficient of 0.55 was the most important, followed by the two concepts of "acceptance of differences" (0.35) and "religion" (0.1). The importance coefficient of the four concepts "equality and anti-discrimination", "goal and content", "teaching method" and "peaceful coexistence" with frequency of one is equal to zero, and the 8 concepts of "Justice", "Dignity and Human Rights", "Nation/Language", "Gender", "Educational Materials, Tools and Environment", "Evaluation", "Respect for Different Opinions" and "Human and Cultural Relations" have not been given any attention in those textbooks.

The results of this research show that the distribution and dispersion of the components of multicultural education based on the criteria of the philosophy for children curriculum are not balanced in textbooks. Therefore, textbooks need to be revised and redesigned in order to avoid cultural one-sidedness and memory-centeredness.