Curriculum implementation in rural Iran: Primary teachers’ adaptive agency in the tension field of local culture, institutions, and social networks

This study adopts a multi-method qualitative design within a critical ethnographic framework to explore how curriculum is experienced, interpreted, and enacted in rural Iranian primary schools. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews with principals and teachers, the research highlights curriculum enactment as a dynamic process shaped by four interconnected cultural and social forces: traditional constructions of the “good teacher” in rural communities, uneven institutional pressures, the expanding influence of social media on educational authority, and constraints produced by gendered policies and patronage networks in teacher deployment. The findings show that teachers navigate these contradictory conditions through a repertoire of adaptive strategies, including gradually changing their behaviors, redefining the teaching and learning experience, engaging in forms of performative compliance accompanied by hidden resistance, and gradually reconstructing classroom experience. By introducing the concepts of digital–cultural paradoxes and teachers’ adaptive agency, this study proposes a new lens for understanding curriculum enactment in rural educational contexts characterized by cultural and social diversity and underscores the need for policy approaches that better account for the interplay of institutional structures, local cultures, and technological change.