Portraits of Reading Instruction in Pakistan

• In Event: Equity, Inclusion, and Justice in Education

Proposal

We now live in an increasingly digitalized world, with rapid technological advancements re-shaping how we learn and work. At the same time, however, millions of children around the world continue to struggle to even read. In Pakistan, 77 percent of children are unable to read with proficiency and comprehension at the late primary stage (World Bank, 2022). This doctoral study, motivated by this staggeringly high learning poverty in Pakistan, takes an in-depth exploratory look at the reading instruction taking place inside the country's early-grade classrooms. Instruction being a crucial factor influencing student reading outcomes, this study explores what teachers are doing in the classroom, and why they do what they do.

The study thus acknowledges the conference aim of exploring the experiences of educators and envisioning teaching in the digital society but takes this further by looking at the experiences of those on the other side of the 'digital divide'. It is motivated by the belief that until we tackle the glaring disparities in learning outcomes and literacies, we can neither fully reap the potential benefits of technological advancements, nor successfully navigate the challenges that these may bring. In this, the study is directly aligned with the current 'back-to-the-basics' focus of the international education community on foundational learning.

This study is informed by socio-cultural theory, a theoretical perspective that makes the case that individuals, with their beliefs, perspectives and their actions, are shaped by their unique socio-cultural contexts. Because qualitative research “allows researchers to get at the inner experience of participants, to determine how meanings are formed through and in culture” (Corbin & Strauss, 2008, p.12), I adopted this research paradigm as it aligns well with the sociocultural theoretical tradition (O’Connell, 2018). I collected data for this multiple case study from eight primary-level teachers at three government schools and two low-cost private schools in the Punjab province through five rounds of semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and journal entries. This data was supplemented by the data collected through a focus group session with a secondary sample of eleven primary teachers, as well as semi-structured interviews with three curriculum developers working with the federal government.

In order to answer the twin questions of how and why teachers are teaching their students to read the way they are, I examine teachers' instructional practices in the context of four broad-- and intersecting--spheres of influence : their biography and personal and professional educational experiences; their beliefs, values and perspectives as shaped by their socio-cultural and religious contexts; the education ecosystem within which they work; and the theories about learning to read under the influence of which they teach.

The early results emerging from a cross-case thematic analysis suggest that teachers' instructional practice is shaped by the concurrent, albeit unequal, influence of all four spheres. The broad instructional method is surprisingly homogenous across the sample, despite the variance in school-level contexts and constraints, and makes apparent the influence of the teachers' personal educational experiences: their methods continue to align more with how they themselves recall being taught to read--through the traditional rote-learning method-- than with the phonics-based instruction prescribed by the curriculum. These experiences and beliefs similarly inform the learning theories they espouse. While some teachers pay lip-service to phonics-based instruction, most have either a superficial understanding of what this entails in practice, or no understanding at all. This leads to instruction in the classroom becoming a hybridization of what the teacher understands phonics-based instruction to be and the traditional rote-learning mode of instruction that she invariably tends to revert to.

Teachers' beliefs and perspectives, especially around mother tongue-based instruction and the relative value and utility of teaching and learning various languages in the Pakistani context-- products of their socio-religious environment as well as the collective colonial experience--heavily influence not only their language teaching practices but also classroom decisions like which language(s) students are permitted to use in the classroom or even with their peers during non-instructional time. Similarly, their understanding of reading as 'correct decoding' translates into classroom practice in the form of a heavy emphasis on developing decoding skills, at the expense of comprehension.

Unsurprisingly, instructional practice is also influenced in a very direct way by the local education ecosystem. Teachers cite classroom- and school-level factors--such as student background and motivation, class sizes and resource limitations-- as well as system-level factors--such the language portion of the recently implemented Single National Curriculum, assessment policies, the per-capita school funding model used in the government sector, and the student promotion policy at government schools-- as factors influencing their teaching.

In response to the learning crisis, there have been many calls, at both the global as well as national levels, to transform teacher classroom practice. However, I will argue that before any such calls are made, attempts should be made to understand teacher practice--not only in terms of its visible determinants, but also the invisible ones, such as the teachers' life and educational experiences, and the beliefs, values and perspectives they bring to the classroom and which shape how they teach. “[S]tudent outcomes are significantly affected by the teachers who teach them” (Rawal, Aslam & Jamil, 2013, p. 19). We thus need to understand who these teachers are in order to understand why they teach the way they do (Hargreaves, 1991; Niyozov, 2008). The main contribution of this study is thus that it aims to understand these teachers' instructional practices comprehensively and by exploring the various areas of influence through which they are shaped. This understanding is a crucial first step in designing curricula and policies which are attuned to the teachers and the contexts within which they work, because it is only then that they are likely to be sustainable and produce the desired gains in reading outcomes.

Author

• Izza Tahir, OISE, University of Toronto