Oral Histories of Educational Change and Digital Futures in Egypt
Linda Herrera, professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, is a social anthropologist with regional expertise in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). She previously held the position of Senior Lecturer at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam where she was convenor of the Children and Youth Studies specialization. Prior to that, she lived in Egypt for 17 years and worked in international development and social science research capacity programs for the MENA region. She has studied, written about, and taught courses on education and power in the MENA region, qualitative research methods (with a focus on critical ethnography and oral history), international development policy, youth and generations, childhood in global context, the social effects of technological change, and critical democracy and citizenship education. She has served as an international education advisor in Egypt and was director of the Education 2.0 Research and Documentation Project (2019-2023). Her books include Educating Egypt, Global Middle East, Revoultion in the Age of Social Media, Wired Citizenship, Being Young and Muslim, and Cultures of Arab Schooling. She has also curated the YouTube channels Critical Voices in Critical Times, Democracy Dialogue, and Education 2.0. In the academic year 2023/24, Linda is affiliated with EUME.
Oral Histories of Educational Change and Digital Futures in Egypt
In 2018, Egypt embarked on a major reform to build a “new education system” also called “Education 2.0” through curriculum redesign, teacher training, and an ambitious program of digital transformation. Linda Herrera advised on, researched, and documented the first five years of this historic reform. She carried out a series of oral history interviews with architects of the new system and worked with a small team to track how students, parents, and teachers adapted to (or not) the changes. During her time at EUME, Herrera will complete an edited book drawing on oral histories of Education 2.0 to interrogate educational change and digital futures in Egypt. This work will highlight some of the advantages of educational digitization, particularly with the Egyptian Knowledge Bank, while also raising critical questions about technological solutionism in education reform. This book is part of Herrera’s multi-platform education research that includes a YouTube Channel and a website so that other people working in research and education policy change can access and analyze primary source materials.
