The Impact of School Culture on Parental Perception of Education in Rural Schools, Egypt

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Shifting paradigms on sustainable development: complexities of teaching and youth education

Proposal

Lack of education is one of the challenges facing rural Egypt as education is commonly perceived to be insignificant. Deal & Peterson (1990) believe that schools have their own culture or a unique “character”, defined as the “underlying social meanings that shape beliefs and behaviors over time” (p.17). Each school can reproduce existing cultures or produce new cultures, which are “historically rooted and socially transmitted” (p.19). There is a complicated interaction between the micro culture of the school and the macrocosm of the society as the former reflecting the latter. ( Naguib, 2006.p.53).
This is a case study of Dar Al-Arab Academy, a non- profit school that was launched in 2015, in a small village called Kafar Shehta, Al-Ayyat in Egypt. The idea was implemented by a volunteer, currently the school leader, who noticed the lack of education amongst the children in this village. In less than three years, the number of the children in the school has increased and a social change was noticed; parents started to appreciate the value of education and considered mingling with other social classes. Parents from rural Egyptian societies do not believe in the value of education and that is the problem. There is a gap in literature as parents’ voices are seldom heard or recorded when it comes to school culture. Therefore, the study will examine the impact of school culture on the rural society’s parental perceptions of the value of education, and since “leadership shapes culture” (Deal & Peterson.1990. p.24), we need to examine it first.
This research aims to provide change-oriented school leaders with practices that can positively impact people’s perception outside schools. The main research questions are: What type of school culture have the leaders of Dar Al-Arab Academy , a rural school in Al-Ayyat created in their school and consequently, to what extent has this culture affected parental perception of education? It is also constructed on multidimensional theoretical framework: the leadership styles theories, the organizational change theory and the perception theory. This theoretical framework provides the base knowledge to analyze the leadership practices and the culture behind the school outputs, which directs the research process to better understand parental perceptions. Moreover, it will be conducted in a mixed method approach, which combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches and allows “better understanding of the research problem and question than either method by itself.”( Creswell.2012. p.535).

Author

• Noha Nagy Mahmoud, American University in Cairo