Copyright

Linda Herrera

Published On

2025-11-17

Page Range

pp. 99–112

Language

  • English

Print Length

14 pages

5. ‘We Break the Rules’

Interview with Deena Boraie

  • Linda Herrera (author)
Chapter of: Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt(pp. 99–112)
Deena Boraie, Senior Advisor for Assessment, Examinations, and Curriculum at the Ministry of Education (2017-2022), recounts how she joined the advisory team of the Minister of Education Tarek Shawki with a mission to ‘transform’, rather than ‘reform’ the education system. She explains their unorthodox approach to educational change and how they ‘broke the rules’ by, for example, foregoing piloting and consultations with the communities on the ground. She outlines the two main pillars of the reform, namely, to build a new curriculum and teaching methodology starting with the early primary years, and to change the structure and design of the Thanaweya Amma high school exit/university entrance exam which drives the system into rote memorization and superficial learning. While they succeeded with the former, the later faced public and political pushback and they were only able to make incremental inroads.

Contributors

Linda Herrera

(author)
Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the Global Studies in Education program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Linda Herrera is Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership in the Global Studies in Education program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was director of the Education 2.0 Research and Documentation Project in Egypt and served as an international education advisor. A social anthropologist with expertise in the Middle East and North Africa, her research and teaching cover a range of areas including education and power, youth studies, citizenship education and critical democracy, technology and society, and international education development. Her books include, Educating Egypt: Civic Values and Ideological Struggles (American University in Cairo Press, 2022), Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century (with A. Bayat, University of California Press, 2021), Revolution in the Age of Social Media (Verso, 2014), Wired Citizenship: Youth Learning and Activism in the Middle East (Routledge, 2014), Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North (with A. Bayat, Oxford University Press, 2010), and Cultures of Arab Schooling: Critical Ethnographies from Egypt (with C. A. Torres, State University of New York Press, 2006).