“Taking context seriously”: The implementation of National Curriculum of Pakistan (NCP) in the Afghan Refugee Village (ARV) Schools.

• In Event: Refugee education: context, pedagogy, access and outcomes

Proposal

In the age of “hyper-connectedness” (Brubaker, 2022), the role of technology in socio-economic development has become essential and inevitable. Given its transformative capacity, where digital technologies are utilized to meet development targets such as improving access to quality education, health, etc., an uneven distribution of technologies, also known as the digital divide, can contribute to the existing inequalities and lead to creating new forms of disadvantages (Helsper, 2021). Moreover, claims that “traditional classroom instructions fall short of providing an immediate learning environment, faster evaluations, and more engagement” and that the efficiencies of digital tools are unparalleled by traditional learning methodologies (Haleem, 2022, p.275) accentuate the importance of context concerning educational policy formulation, enactment and implementation. The top-down policies, with all its technocratic and bureaucratic blind spots, fail to address the stakeholders’ needs at the ground level or, in the worst case, they end up broadening the gaps they initially intended to bridge. The top-down approach, due to its traditional, narrow, and “technocratic perspective” (Johnson, 2013, p.13), not only “renders powerless those who are meant to put the policy into action” but also disregards the contextual dimensions that intimately shape and influence the implementation of policies.
In 2019, the government of Pakistan, in collaboration with UNHCR, implemented the Pakistani curriculum in Afghan Refugee Village (ARV) schools, replacing the previously in-place Afghan curriculum. As a key global strategy since 2012, the underlying motive of the transition was to regularize and standardize refugee education, thus enhancing stability and accountability (Reddick & Chopra, 2021). Conceptually grounded in the concepts of “policy dumping” (Hamid & Nguyen, 2016) and the proposed “contextual dimensions” of Ball et al. (2011), the study investigates the implementation of the National Curriculum of Pakistan (NCP) in the ARV schools by exploring the views and perspectives of the main stakeholders: ARV school teachers and students. “Policy dumping” refers to a top-down policy and planning initiated by macro-level actors such as politicians and other policymakers without making any substantial effort or taking responsibility for the quality of the implementation. Hamid and Nguyen (2016) further elaborate that policy dumping is a situation when the “traditional policy actors take credit for policy initiation, but the onus of implementation is left with those at the lower strata of the policy hierarchy” (p. 35). Moreover, Ball et al. (2011) argue that “policy creates context, but context also precedes policy” (p.20), and neglecting the context-specific constraints, pressures, and resource environments not only fails to locate policy processes but also leads to its dematerialization. A proper context-sensitive understanding requires the examination of four contextual dimensions: “school’s setting, its history and intake” (p. 21) (situated context), “values and commitments within schools” (p.26) (professional context), “physical aspects of a school: buildings and budgets, but also to levels of staffing, information technologies, and infrastructure” (p.29) (material context) and “pressures and expectations generated by wider local and national policy frameworks” (external contexts). (emphasis in original, p.36). Using this framework, we argue that top-down policies that are uninformed of “contextual dimensions” qualify as “policy dumping”.
For this purpose, 40 students and ten teachers from two ARV schools (a boys’ and a girls’ school) participated in the study, with an equal gender ratio among the participants. With four sessions at each school, eight body mapping sessions were conducted, each followed by a group discussion. As “a creative and flexible art-based tool” (Henderson et al., 2023), body-mapping usually involves a life-sized body image that can be a pre-prepared body outline template or constructed through painting or drawing by the participant/s (Coetzee et al., 2019). Later, a series of imagined scenarios can prompt the participant/s to articulate their answers visually, through writing or other art-based techniques onto the body maps (Henderson et al., 2023). The choice of body mapping visual methodology was determined by its effectiveness in acquiring young people’s voices and experiences in poverty and conflict-ridden contexts (Helmer et al., 2015). Moreover, the teacher participants were interviewed individually.
The data gleaned from the body maps and group and individual interviews demonstrated that implementing the new curriculum and its associated languages were inconsistent with contextual realities. Without drawing on the culture, language, and identity and considering their refugee status, the curriculum implementation completely disregarded the situated context, that is, the locality, the nature of intake, and the identity of the stakeholders. Being implemented in a camp that shares a common history, culture, values, and language, the new curriculum conflicted with the ARV schools' professional context. Similarly, uninformed of the material context, the existing material conditions of the schools—from lack of internet to underpaid teachers and limited school funding—the implementation of the curriculum did not consider the material capacity of the ARV schools. Furthermore, the participants’ responses delineate that the implementation of the NCP was out of keeping with the political instability and did not consider their precarious status and “unknowable futures” (Dryden-Peterson, 2017, p.16). Overall, the study not only fills the empirical gap by exploring the views and perspectives of Afghan refugee teachers and students in Pakistan but also highlights the importance of foregrounding the context in the policy processes.

Authors

• Muhammad Yasir Khan, Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education

• Naureen Durrani, Nazarbayev Univeity