Highlighted Session: Envisioning a new education system: Digital futures and cultural change in Egypt

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

In September 2018, the Egyptian Ministry of Education and Technical Education began rolling out elements of a “New Education System also known as “Education 2.0.” Its reforms, mainly in curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and teacher training with a strong emphasis on digital transformation, represent a bold attempt to reimagine and redesign the system of Kindergarten through Grade 12, the likes of which had not been attempted for well over half a century. The reforms are intended to raise the quality of a long deteriorating and over stressed education system while transforming the culture of learning to prepare Egyptian society for the unpredictable, yet unstoppable, changes occurring in the realms of work, communications, and technology associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In short, the new education system is designed to fundamentally reengineer society in a futuristic direction, however it remains to be seen what this future will look like, how it will alter the learning landscape.
The research presented in this panel was collected over two years during a period of unparalleled political and technological change combined with major upsets brought on by the Coronavirus pandemic. Moving between the macro levels of state planning and international cooperation, to the micro levels of students and school communities, this panel interrogates the vision, empirical realities, and consequences—intentional and not—of a top-down national reform. It theoretically engages broad processes of "platformization" and techno-solutionism, the changing political economy of the shadow educational system, and how educational communities, particularly students, adapted to home schooling, experienced online platforms and digital assessments, and formed online and in-person collaborative networks for studying, cheating, and other coping mechanisms.
The papers herein explore four themes connected to the new education reforms and schooling during the pandemic. The first reviews the rise and fall of the research projects that were introduced as an alternative mode of assessment to traditional in-school exams for middle-school students. This was the first-time students had a take-home assessment. The second paper focuses on students in high-school and interrogates how they reacted to changes in the examination system, which included the mandatory use of tablets, studying from the new question banks, and “human-less” grading. Taking into consideration the rise of multiple digital learning platforms and apps, the third paper reviews how private tutoring and the vast shadow education system deftly adapted itself to the new digital educational landscape. Finally, the fourth paper puts a spotlight on the Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB), a massive curated online library that contains the contents of 120 databases from thirty-one international publishers, and is available free of charge to all Egyptians in Egypt. The EKB has special portals for students in years K-12 and houses a learning management system for teachers. From a methodological perspective, the research combines remote case studies, oral histories with students and teachers, and digital social research on social media and e-learning platforms. These approaches are supplemented by analyses of primary and secondary sources materials.
As the largest country in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Egypt has historically stood as an educational leader throughout Africa and the Arab states. The experience of Egypt illuminates shifts occurring in global education policy, the social and economic effects of digitization, social inequalities and digital divides. The observations and findings speak to directions of educational futures in not only low-and-middle-income countries, but more broadly. Egypt thus provides a compelling case study not only to understand educational change, but to reimagine educational futures.

Sub Unit

• Middle East SIG

Chair

• Linda Herrera, University of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign

Individual Presentations

• The rise and fall of take-home projects during Covid-19 - Heba Shama, EDU 2.0 Research and Documentation Project

• Private lessons and the rise of techno-entrepreneurs - Hany Zayed, University of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign

• Students and the upheaval of Egypt’s General Secondary Exams - Nairy AbdElShafy, Columbia University

• The Egyptian Knowledge Bank: A Game Changer? - Linda Herrera, University of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign