Abstract

Pakistan’s efforts to adopt a multilingual education policy has come after much deliberation and anticipation. From the dominant Urdu language policy for the masses and English exclusively reserved for elite institutes, to a gradual and promising shift that recognizes English as a global language, and includes regional languages in the curriculum are promising. Yet all is not well with Pakistan’s multilingual society. Pakistan’s turn to multilingual language policy continues to be informed by monoglossic views, which are inconsistent with people’s inherently multilingual habitus and changing identities. English remains distant and dominant for a wide majority. Though Urdu is the lingua franca of Pakistan and widely spoken across the South Asian region, it is presented with tensions in its national, official and educational statuses. These tensions are manifested in “fast-acting and slow-acting language conflicts” (Lo Bianco, 2016) at the national level, and in the communicative and cognitive challenges that hinder students’ pathways to learning in the classrooms. This calls for a language policy that is locally grounded and holistically informed.

For a deeper understanding of these conflicting language relationships, I invite you to take this journey with me into the Indian subcontinent multilingual practices that date back to the Indus Civilization, and are sustained in the meshings of the global literacies into the local repertoires in Pakistan today. In this presentation, I plan to examine some contemporary multilingual pedagogies and their applicability to Pakistan’s educational practices. I conclude with proposals for more agentive opportunities to the curriculum and classroom practices in pursuit of equitable pathways to learning that are more holistic and optimistic.