The Politics of Educational Change: Contesting the Digital Transformation of Egyptian Education

• In Event: Highlighted Session: The Power of Protest in Educational Transformation and Reform in the Middle East North African Context

Proposal

In late 2018, Egypt began implementing an audacious reform program involving the ‘digital transformation’ of its national education system. Intended to improve Egyptian education and solve its endemic problems, this massive educational digitalization was accelerated by Covid-19 with a speed, scope and depth unprecedented in Egyptian educational history. This paper examines the politics of educational change at a time of digital transformation and pandemic acceleration. It asks in what ways, and for what reasons, were Egyptian students contesting the top-down state-led techno-educational change.

Using longitudinal interviews with educational communities as well as qualitative social media research in student-led groups conducted between 2020 and 2023, this paper argues that, and shows how, Egyptian students deployed various forms of bottom up resistance practices, including digital collective cheating, tablet hacking, crashing the system, digital activism and street protests, against the top-down state-led educational change. Those practices depended on situational constraints, opportune cracks, technological affordances and student objectives at different times, and while some of those practices undermined the whole reform project, others rejected, and sought to modify, certain facets of it. Building on the work of Asef Bayat (2017; 2021), Michel de Certeau (1984) and Linda Herrera (2014; 2022), this paper shows how Egyptian students, through their resistance practices, were collectively redressing injustices, reclaiming their rights to a better education, and articulating their agency against state-led educational change and unfair structural conditions exacerbated by Covid-19. They were also building community and forging solidarity with their anonymous peers in a youth subversive counterculture. One that is linked to a cruel post-revolutionary political economy and a colorful history of collective action.

By telling a story of change, resistance and possibility in Egyptian education, this paper brings together, and extends, the fields of social movements and digital activism, comparative and international education, education policy studies, education and Middle Eastern studies, and more broadly, digital sociology and digital education. It offers not only an empirical intervention from the global South at a critical historical juncture, but theoretical, methodological, and practical ones as well.


References
Bayat, Asef. 2017. Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring. Stanford University Press.
Bayat, Asef. 2021. Revolutionary Life: The Everyday of the Arab Spring. Harvard University Press.
De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press.
Herrera, Linda. 2014. Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet. Verso.
Herrera, Linda. 2022. Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles. American University in Cairo Press.

Author

• Hany Zayed, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign