Cultural knowledge education, which includes an understanding of both tangible and intangible cultural elements, behavioral patterns, and social processes within a specific community or group, is considered essential for promoting sustainable tourism development. Tourism higher education plays a crucial role in harnessing this knowledge. However, the integration of cultural knowledge within tourism curricula has not been extensively explored in academic research. This paper, focusing on tourism higher education in Iran, seeks to examine how different components of cultural knowledge are integrated into the curricula of undergraduate, graduate, and PhD programs. Using a qualitative design, the study analyzes the curricula of these programs through documentary research. Initially, courses relevant to cultural knowledge were identified through keyword searches, followed by a qualitative content analysis of course content to pinpoint the cultural knowledge components. The results indicate that cultural knowledge is more prominently incorporated at the undergraduate level than in the postgraduate programs. Furthermore, the distribution of cultural knowledge across graduate and PhD programs is unbalanced, especially when compared to the undergraduate curriculum. Given that these postgraduate programs aim to prepare future mid-to-senior-level managers and researchers in tourism, this imbalance highlights a significant gap. Therefore, revising the curricula to better integrate diverse cultural knowledge components is a critical priority for advancing sustainable tourism development in the country.
