Beyond alef, be, pe: the socialisation of incipient ideology through literacy practices in an Iranian first-grade classroom

Abstract

This article examines the interrelationship between literacy and the socialisation of incipient ideology. We focus on one first-grade classroom in Tehran, Iran, as students and teacher engage in a complex literacy event centering on a lesson from the national reader, bekhaanim (Let's Read). In the course of this textually driven meaning-making activity, we observe how participants explore and respond to elements of school-based language use as it unfolds explicitly and implicitly. The three-part structure of the IRF (teacher initiation–student response–teacher feedback) serves as the primary vehicle through which explicit teaching of content and behavior occurs. However, it is also this structure that serves as the primary vehicle for implicitly constituted school-situated dynamics where first-grade Iranian boys are socialised into values of their society – values of respect and reverence for authority, friendship, brotherhood, and solidarity – while experiencing their first exposure to the literacy practices of spelling, reading, and writing.