The English in our classrooms.

Byline: Komal Waqar

The first time I heard Nadia* read, it broke my heart. I had been prepared for this. As a newly-initiated Teach for Pakistan Fellow, I knew about the achievement gap. I knew that our public schooling system was producing students who couldn't read simple sentences in English or Urdu. I knew this and yet, the sight of a fifth grader pausing at every word was nothing I'd ever been prepared for. As I listened to Nadia struggle, I thought of the glossy hard-bound reader my school had assigned in the fifth grade and the ability to read complex stories fluently and confidently that I had so far been taking for granted, like the ability to breathe.

I'd started my Fellowship believing reading to be a skill and a pathway for further learning. All you need is the right sort of instruction, the right sort of texts and you'll be able to read. That's what I was there for. I was obsessed with empowering my students to read - and to love it as much as I did; it was my Big Goal for my Fellowship.

Towards the end of my Fellowship, as Nadia and her classmates showed academic improvement, I had stopped believing that mastering reading was all that mattered. Poverty was vicious, encroaching every aspect of my students' lives from the healthcare they were able to access to the difficulties they faced in commuting to school. When I was writing this article, the Kemari gas leak happened. The fumes were reported to have reached Shirin Jinnah Colony - where their school is. Every headline reminded me of them; they were disproportionately affected, did they have access to doctors? Did they know how to protect themselves? Could they protect themselves? I thought of Samira, whose mother had once fallen sick because there was a gas leak in her house. Now as the country grapples with Covid-19, these questions still remain.

Was a 'good education' really enough for them to exorcise poverty out of their lives? Why are the markers of a good education so closely tied with proficiency in English? Out of the 120 girls I taught, how many would make it to college, to university? How many would find a job that would allow for social mobility? Could a good education - good English - be enough to grant them access into elite spaces?

Still looking for answers, still thinking literacy could be neatly arranged into a series of steps, I enrolled in grad school for an MPhil in Education. I dove into theory, believing it to hold the answers. I came across Bourdieu's theory of language as "symbolic capital". Proficiency in a language allows you to move through social spaces and accords you prestige. Additionally, the ethnographic understanding of literacy as a social practice helped recast reading as a cultural and social practice rather than just a technical set of skills such as word recognition and phonics.

Theorists like Brian Street have consistently argued for language and literacy to be understood in the wider context of the societies they exist in. For us...

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