Sumaira Noreen

Sumaira Noreen completed her PhD in History at Royal Holloway, University of London in October 2014. Her doctoral thesis examined the British educational policies shaping the secondary curriculum organisation and discussed whether departures from the colonial patterns of established knowledge could be made in the post-independence context of Pakistan.

Sumaira’s current project at LSE takes further the debate about secondary curriculum dynamics in Pakistan. When put in the historiographical context, debates about Pakistan’s secondary curriculum policy have broadly revolved around three claims; religious ideology, citizenship dynamics, and focus on vocational and scientific education. Deriving evidence from primary and secondary sources such as policy documents, official reports and correspondences, conferences, speeches, and newspaper articles, etc., the project aims at providing in-depth analysis of Pakistan’s secondary curriculum policy developments during the early decades of Pakistan’s existence.

Before joining the LSE in 2022 as a Postdoctoral Fellow, she served as faculty in Lahore College for Women University, Lahore. Sumaira has supervised research in key areas of history of education policy, curriculum organisation, textbooks’ content analyses, and contemporary areas of curriculum evaluation, narrative writing skills, leadership in learning organisations, second language acquisition, inclusive education, global citizenship education, and other SDG priority areas. The supervised researches involve a breadth of research methods; including, historical description and interpretation, experimental design, model application, content analysis, and action research.

Expertise

South Asian History; History of Education Policy; Colonial and post-colonial Curriculum; Socio-cultural heritage; Narrative writing of specially-abled children