Naureen Durrani

The role of numeracy skills in graduate employability

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to explore the role and importance of numeracy skills in graduate recruitment within a diversity of employment sectors.Design/methodology/approach – The results of a mixed‐methods study, involving three online surveys (including an employer survey), student focus group sessions and interviews with tutors, are presented.Findings – The results reveal the importance that employers attach to graduates’ numeracy skills and the extent to which employers use numeracy tests in graduate recruitment. They thus highlight the potential for poor numeracy skills to limit any graduates acquisition of employment, irrespective of their degree subject; especially since numeracy tests are used predominantly in recruitment to the types of jobs commensurate with graduates’ career aspirations and within sectors that attract graduates from across the diversity of academic disciplines, including the arts and humanities.Research limitations/implications – Since participants were self‐sele...

Schooling the ‘other’: the representation of gender and national identities in Pakistani curriculum texts

Until relatively recently, educational research in developing countries has focused mainly on issues of access for addressing gender inequalities in education. This paper argues that challenging patriarchal relations in schooling and education requires moving beyond access to understanding the ways the curriculum acts as a set of discursive practices which position girls and boys unequally and differently constitute them as gendered and nationalised/ist subjects. Using curriculum texts from Pakistan, the paper explores how gender and national identities intersect in a dynamic way in the processes of schooling. The paper illustrates the ideological power of both curriculum and school experiences in fashioning the reciprocal performance and construction of gender and national identities in Pakistan. It contends that in its current form, education is a means of maintaining, reproducing and reinforcing the gender hierarchies that characterise Pakistan.

Curriculum and national identity: exploring the links between religion and nation in Pakistan

This paper investigates the relationship between schooling and conflict in Pakistan using an identity‐construction lens. Drawing on data from curriculum documents, student responses to classroom activities, and single‐sex student focus groups, it explores how students in four state primary schools in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), Pakistan, use curricula and school experiences to make sense of themselves as Pakistani. The findings suggest that the complex nexus of education, religion, and national identity tends to construct ‘essentialist’ collective identities—a single identity as a naturalized defining feature of the collective self. To promote national unity across the diverse ethnic groups comprising Pakistan, the national curriculum uses religion (Islam) as the key boundary between the Muslim Pakistani ‘self’ and the antagonist non‐Muslim ‘other’. Ironically, this emphasis creates social polarization and the normalization of militaristic and violent identities, with serious implications for social cohesion, tolerance for internal and external diversity, and gender relations.

Factors influencing undergraduates’ self-evaluation of numerical competence

This empirical study explores factors influencing undergraduates’ self-evaluation of their numerical competence, using data from an online survey completed by 566 undergraduates from a diversity of academic disciplines, across all four faculties at a post-1992 UK university. Analysis of the data, which included correlation and multiple regression analyses, revealed that undergraduates exhibiting greater confidence in their mathematical and numeracy skills, as evidenced by their higher self-evaluation scores and their higher scores on the confidence sub-scale contributing to the measurement of attitude, possess more cohesive, rather than fragmented, conceptions of mathematics, and display more positive attitudes towards mathematics/numeracy. They also exhibit lower levels of mathematics anxiety. Students exhibiting greater confidence also tended to be those who were relatively young (i.e. 18–29 years), whose degree programmes provided them with opportunities to practise and further develop their numeracy skills, and who possessed higher pre-university mathematics qualifications. The multiple regression analysis revealed two positive predictors (overall attitude towards mathematics/numeracy and possession of a higher pre-university mathematics qualification) and five negative predictors (mathematics anxiety, lack of opportunity to practise/develop numeracy skills, being a more mature student, being enrolled in Health and Social Care compared with Science and Technology, and possessing no formal mathematics/numeracy qualification compared with a General Certificate of Secondary Education or equivalent qualification) accounted for approximately 64% of the variation in students’ perceptions of their numerical competence. Although the results initially suggested that male students were significantly more confident than females, one compounding variable was almost certainly the students’ highest pre-university mathematics or numeracy qualification, since a higher percentage of males (24%) compared to females (15%) possessed an Advanced Subsidiary or A2 qualification (or equivalent) in mathematics. Of particular concern is the fact that undergraduates based in Health and Social Care expressed significantly less confidence in their numeracy skills than students from any of the other three faculties.

Youth Researching Youth

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) played a key role in constructing children and young people as autonomous individuals and rights holders. The dominance of human-rights in international policy discourses and the subsequent popularity of rights-based approaches in governance and development have fostered a culture of “participation”, which has influenced the ways adults work with children and young people in policy making and the delivery of services concerning them (McNamara, 2011), as well as their participation in research (Bradbury-Jones & Taylor, 2013).

Teachers as agents of peace? Exploring teacher agency in social cohesion in Pakistan

Abstract This paper studies an under-researched area – teachers’ role in peacebuilding in conflict-affected contexts – through exploring teacher agency for social cohesion in Pakistan. Insights are sought into teachers’ perspectives on the major drivers of conflict in society and the role of education and teachers in social cohesion and mitigating inequities in education. A 4Rs framework of redistribution, recognition, representation and reconciliation was employed to analyse data gathered from: interviews with and classroom observations of teacher educators; focus-group discussions with and a questionnaire completed by pre- and in-service teachers; and analysis of teacher education and school curriculum texts. While teachers expressed a nuanced understanding of the conflict drivers in society and appreciated the significance of education in peacebuilding, they subscribed to assimilationist approaches to social cohesion, which were aligned with curriculum texts and promoted official nation-building agendas. Additionally, teachers saw issues of social cohesion as peripheral to the core academic curriculum. Teachers’ identity was integrally linked to their religious affiliations.

Youth negotiation of citizenship identities in Pakistan: Implications for global citizenship education in conflict-contexts

ABSTRACT This study explores young students’ negotiation of their citizenship identities at the intersection of their class, gender, religious and ethnic identifications in the conflict-affected setting of Pakistan. While much of the global literature on global citizenship education (GCE) primarily takes into account the perspectives of middle-class or elite students located in richer economies, the current study is centred on a socio-demographically diverse group of young people in a low-income setting. With a specific focus on their negotiation of issues around diversity and justice, students’ narratives generated important recommendations for a transformative and historically nuanced postcolonial/decolonial approach to global citizenship engagement that should be considered more broadly. The study illuminates the ways the global/local historical, cultural, political and economic factors influence individual relationship with GCE and offers useful pedagogical and policy implications for GCE ‘from below’.

Senegal: Muslim Youth Identities in a Secular Nation

This chapter presents an analysis of the ways youth in Senegal articulated their identities with respect to nation, religion and gender. Identity was understood as an ongoing discursive production involving differentiation against constitutive ‘others’. Youth’s identity constructions were explored through focus group discussions which gave space for their identity work. The focus groups involved 75 youth (35 females and 40 males) in Dakar and its vicinity. Forty-seven of these were Muslim and 28 were Christian. Senegal is a predominantly Muslim country which became a secular republic after gaining independence from France in the 1960s. The analysis highlights the complex ways in which nation, gender and religion intersected in youth’s identity constructions. Youth’s narratives show how their national and religious affiliations were sutured together, in contrast to the strong separation of nation and religion that is assumed within some understandings of the modern ‘secular’ nation. The entanglement of their religious and national belongings was also integral to the ways their nation was defined against its colonial past, with Sufi leaders in particular being singled out as national heroes for having unified the nation in opposition to the colonial other. Senegalese youth further proclaimed the distinctiveness of Senegalese or ‘African’ Islam. Its fusions with traditional customs and beliefs allowed Islam to take root in multiple syncretic forms across Senegal. This syncretism and ‘Africanity’ were valued, and constructed in opposition to the other of the ‘diabolized’ or ‘jihadist’ Islam that youth felt was practised in other contexts, such as the Middle East, or Afghanistan. However in relation to gender, considerable tensions were evident in how this intersected with youth’s discourses of nation, religion and ethnicity. Within national, religious and sometimes ethic discourses, powerful gender hierarchies emerged, which often left women constructed in a subordinated position. Each of these discourses (nation, religion and ethnicity) could be recruited individually to justify unequal gender norms. Their power is intensified when recruited together, and conjoined with potentially negative associations with modernity as an imposition from the Global North. Although contested in female focus groups in particular, promises of equality that are supposedly at the heart of republican values prove evanescent.

Nigeria: Muslim Youth and Internal Others in a Multi-religious Nation

This chapter presents an analysis of the ways that Muslim youth from Northern Nigeria construct, assert and navigate their identities. It locates this analysis within the contested social and political landscape and the complex distinctiveness of the population. Importantly, this contextualisation includes reference to the colonial history and its significance to the formation of the Nigerian State. The data gathered largely through focus groups discussions were used to explore how youth understood and articulated their sense of belonging in national, ethnic, religious and gender terms as well as their sense of difference and distinction from others. Despite the strong sense of national allegiance and pride, many Muslim youth expressed dissatisfaction with democratic and government processes. In their identity narratives religion was a dominant discursive axis of belonging and of differentiation. While as Muslims they were keen to distance themselves from extremism, terrorism and the actions of Boko Haram, they constructed Christians as the ‘internal other’. This discursive Fracturing of the nation revivified the birth scars of the Nigerian state and its uneasy historical emergence as a postcolonial, multi-religious democracy. At the same time a conflation of region and religion (Northern Muslim—Southern Christian) worked to flatten local ethnic differences. As region and religion did not map neatly on to one another, Northern Muslim youth invested considerable effort to ‘other’ their Muslim compatriots from the south. This was accomplished through the derision of Southerners including Muslims for their westernisation and loss of culture, in opposition to the superior and more ‘pure’ Islamic identity and practice of Northern Muslims. Turning to gender, the lack of an explicit reference to this within youth narratives of identity stood in stark comparison with the way it structured everyday life. Gender relations were an important symbol of religious identity. These conjoined with dominant masculinities to find expression in projections of subservient, modest femininities although these were at times resisted by some female youth. Finally, this case study illustrates the importance of the local context to the ways that young people try to produce themselves as intelligible subjects, and the significance of the complex political and geographical histories of nation-state formation as the backdrop to the youth identity narratives.

Geographies of Identity

This chapter introduces the key concepts of the research and the theoretical frameworks we draw on to analyse our four country case studies. After addressing the concept of youth, we use poststructural and postcolonial theories to elaborate our understandings of identities as being multiple and fluid, always in process. These perspectives are again drawn upon to understand gender, as constantly brought into being in performative ways. We conclude this section by emphasising the significance of belonging and affiliation in the production of identities. As part of our concern with youth’s national belongings, we explore the complexities of citizen identities, probing the imagined community of the nation, and how national affiliations may, or may not, coincide with modern nation-state boundaries. We problematise the Western origins of the nation-state and the implications for states emerging from coloniality. We then consider the relevance of the nation-state within a globalised world and related questions about post-national or more cosmopolitan forms of citizenship. Pursuing our interest in different axes of youth identities, we turn to religion, interrogating the supposed separation of religion and politics in secular modernity, as well as the putative incompatibility of Islam with modernity and modern state formation. We return to cosmopolitanism to critique its modern, Eurocentric origins and the implications for ‘Muslim cosmopolitanism’. We conclude this chapter by engaging with feminist and postcolonial literature which demonstrates how national and religious affiliations are consistently and pervasively inflected by gender.