Contested Identities; Competing Accountabilities: the making of a ‘good’ Pakistani public schoolteacher

• In Event: Political Economy Research to Improve Systems of Education: Insights from the RISE Program and Related Projects

Proposal

This study investigates how systemic frictions place competing demands for performance on ‘good’ teachers in the Pakistani public education system. In the country’s conflict-affected Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, I explore how class, political and service structure frictions get embedded in rules and strategies that define the field of teacher career progression. Through a condensed ethnographic exercise involving participant observation in schools and public offices, interviews, and archival analysis, I assemble a picture of power arrangements through which teaching, and in turn, learning, is mediated by inefficiencies of the Pakistani state.
The power dynamics I unpack through this study are framed by Schiefelbein and McGinn’s stakeholder analysis, which considers the complex engagements actors undertake as they shape, and are shaped by, the policy spaces they occupy. This agentic process of shaping sites suggests there exists a ‘field’ of public education in the Bourdieuian sense. In these spaces of (non)financial transactions, why and how do individuals become public schoolteachers, and what do strategies for survival and career growth reveal about the value education actors attribute to teaching?
The findings further an emerging discourse on incoherence in the design and systemic uptake of effective teaching, hence learning, policy. The study also picks up on contradictions and collectives in Pakistan’s educational context from the perspective of self-interested agents, such as teachers and senior executives. In doing so, it moves Pakistani education discourse beyond input-output reform models that often miss the everyday nuance of why more schooling continues to yield little learning in the country.

Author

• Soufia Siddiqi, LUMS