‘What We Teach Is True to Us’: Non‐National Students and the Boundaries of Belonging in Dubai's Schools

ABSTRACT ‘What we teach is true to us’, one social studies teacher reflected when describing the curricular standards guiding his Dubai classroom. But who, in Dubai's multinational classrooms, gets to be part of that ‘us’? Private secondary schools in Dubai have become productive sites for state‐led civic nationalist projects. The United Arab Emirates' (UAE) moral education and social studies curricula, incorporated nationwide into Moral, Social and Cultural Studies (MSCS) in 2022, demonstrate one such project designed to teach national identity, civic expectations and state‐sanctioned ideals of being Emirati to all students. Scholarship on nationalism in the Arabian Peninsula shows that local majority non‐national populations are integral to the production of nationalist projects rather than external to them. Drawing on interviews with secondary school teachers in American and British private schools in Dubai, I examine how the UAE's MSCS curriculum stages non‐national student inclusion within everyday performances of national identity. To this end, I attend specifically to teachers' reflections on how students respond to their lessons. These pedagogies ask students to learn, respect and participate in narratives of civic identity and belonging, extending nationalist participation beyond citizen‐nationals while simultaneously producing and giving meaning to national difference. This study contributes to scholarship on nationalism, citizenship, migration and the geopolitics of education by demonstrating how inclusion within school‐based nationalist projects sustains differentiated relationships to national belonging.