Copyright

Linda Herrera

Published On

2025-11-17

Page Range

pp. 133–146

Language

  • English

Print Length

14 pages

7. Envisioning a New Curriculum for the Primary Stage

Interview with Nelly El Zayat

  • Linda Herrera (author)
Nelly El Zayat served as Advisor to the Minister of Education on Early Childhood Education and Educational Policy. She recounts how the advisory team initially started from a blank page to brainstorm what they considered the ideal attributes of graduates of Egypt’s education system. The new curriculum for the primary years incorporated elements from the International Baccalaureate, UNICEF’s Life Skills framework, and updated methodologies for teaching the Arabic language. Advisors worked with a range of partners from the private sector, international organizations, and the national curriculum center to develop the new books. Racing against time, and while juggling many commitments, they managed to launch the first set of new Education 2.0 books in the fall of 2018.

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).