This study investigates Pakistan's secondary school children's constructions of their national identity in a Pakistani school in Dubai by drawing on data collected from students and teachers from the case school and analysing national curriculum textbooks used in the school. Informed by Foucault's concepts, the article problematises how the curriculum textbooks are employed as a technology of power for inculcating national consciousness in the students. The findings suggest that Pakistan's national curriculum textbooks deploy a specific version of Islam as a major technology, which then influences other national identity signifiers in the textbooks for shaping students' national identity. The school affords a crucial space for the complex interplay of these technologies, which construct students' ethnocentric national identities, encouraging social polarisation. This has implications for Pakistan's national social cohesion as well as the potential for subverting international peaceful coexistence and working relationships, particularly in the selected overseas study context.
This study analyses discourses of Pakistan's national curriculum textbooks for grades 9-12 in the context of developing students' national belonging vis-à-vis inclusive education and global interdependence. Drawing on teachers' interviews and students' focus groups and participatory tools, it also problematises teachers' classroom practices and resulting students' responses in this backdrop. Theorising national belonging as a discursive social practice, the study benefits from Foucault's approach to discourse analysis. The findings highlight a complex interplay of several education system actors for constructing students' national belonging, emphasising an essential relationship between Pakistan and a particular version of Islam. Discursively positioned, the students perceive the world as Muslim versus Non-Muslim and display self-righteousness, evincing strong ethnocentricity towards fellow non-Muslims. The study underlines the implications for not employing education for fostering inclusivity and international collaboration and its consequences for long-term global sustainable development goals (SDGs), 2030.
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