Copyright

Ebtehal Elghamraw; Linda Herrera;

Published On

2025-11-17

Page Range

pp. 239–256

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

14. Discovery Education and Private Sector Partnerships

Interview with Emily Waters

  • Ebtehal Elghamrawy (author)
  • Linda Herrera (author)
Chapter of: Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt(pp. 239–256)
When the Education 2.0 reform was initiated in 2017, Discovery Education worked as a partner with the Ministry of Education and Technical Education for textbooks, Teacher’s Guides, digital content, and teacher professional development. Emily Waters was involved at all stages of the work. She describes the fast-paced reform efforts to build teams with Egyptian counterparts and deliver books. During the COVID-19 pandemic, her team also supported the Ministry with online and blended learning solutions. She reflects on the challenges, and how being involved in such an historic reform brought her a sense of purpose and a deep appreciation for her Egyptian colleagues.

Contributors

Ebtehal Elghamrawy

(author)

Ebtehal Elghamrawy earned an M.Ed. in International Education Policy (IEP) from the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she was also a Teaching Fellow, and a Joint European Master’s degree in Comparative Local Development from a consortium of four European universities. She is currently Education Specialist at UNICEF, leading the quality learning and skilling portfolio for pre-tertiary education. With over fifteen years of experience in program and education management, she has designed, implemented, evaluated, and consulted on education initiatives for more than ten international and national organizations across five countries. Her experience includes collaborations with UNESCO, the non-profit FHI360, TEDxCairo, AIESEC (Association Internationale des Étudiants en Sciences Économiques et Commerciales), and the Educate Me Foundation. Her research and professional efforts are dedicated to enhancing public education quality through the lens of social equity

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).