Coloniality, Resistance, and Reimagining the Future: Exploring the Influence of Language Policies on Learner Identities in Pakistani Schools

Abstract

This paper explores student experiences of language-in-education policies through the lens of colonial processes and traces such logic as they operate through educational institutions. Drawing on semi-structured interviews of high school seniors and recent graduates, I investigate how students in Pakistani secondary schools interact with intersecting modern/colonial structures that rationalize existing hierarchies of power along colonial, racial/ethnic, and gendered lines. The findings suggest that students have internalized dominant colonial ideologies and they also constitute key sites for decolonial resistance at the same time. Student experiences of colonial hierarchies in the school were mediated by their socioeconomic class, gender, ethnic and linguistic background. However, despite internalizing dominant hierarchies, many students understood their experiences through the framing of colonial power structures, which simultaneously positioned them as potential actors for decolonial resistance. In this paper, I analyze their experiences in detail, and in doing so, this study adds to the growing voices in the field of international and comparative education that critically examine the role of modern/colonial formations in the structuring of education globally.