Contributing to a growing body of research on acknowledging U.S. imperialism within teacher education, this article explores how knowledge production on Iran—and U.S.-Iran relations more broadly—in secondary education represents a site of what Britzman has called difficult knowledge. Here, the difficulty of classroom engagements with the theme of U.S. imperialism is highlighted in several epistemic stumbling blocks, notably notions of White epistemic authority, neoliberal multiculturalism, and imperial feeling. Drawing upon data collected during a 9-month ethnographic study, the analysis presents classroom scenes from a high school world literature unit on Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, selected by the teacher to explore themes of colonialism, imperialism, and revolution. Despite these intentions, classroom engagements with the text often reproduced Orientalist understandings. These findings inform the concluding argument that mobilizes contrapuntal reading as a generative technique for teacher education research and practice to identify and confront the epistemic bases that normalize systems of oppression.

本文为越来越多的关于在教师教育中承认美帝国主义的研究做出贡献，探讨了中学教育中关于伊朗以及更广泛的美伊关系的知识生产如何代表布里茨曼所说的困难知识的场所。在这里，以美帝国主义为主题的课堂教学的困难在几个认识障碍中突出显示，特别是白人认识权威、新自由主义多元文化主义和帝国感觉的概念。该分析利用在为期 9 个月的民族志研究中收集的数据，展示了 Marjane Satrapi 的波斯波利斯高中世界文学单元的课堂场景，由老师挑选，探讨殖民主义、帝国主义和革命的主题。尽管有这些意图，但课堂上对文本的参与常常再现了东方主义的理解。这些发现为结论性论点提供了依据，即动员对位阅读作为教师教育研究和实践的生成技术，以识别和面对使压迫系统正常化的认知基础。