Copyright

Linda Herrera

Published On

2025-11-17

Page Range

pp. 273–290

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

16. Rewriting Arabic Books for a New Generation of Readers

Interview with Nevine El Souefi

  • Linda Herrera (author)
Chapter of: Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt(pp. 273–290)
Nevine El Souefi, CEO of the education consulting company Edupedia, worked with the publishing house Nahdet Misr and the Ministry of Education and Technical Education to develop a new methodology for reading and writing Arabic called the ‘balanced approach’ that combines the holistic language and the phonics approaches. She reflects on ways her previous experiences as a schoolteacher, a teacher trainer, and consultant for the International Baccalaureate (IB) prepared her for this important national work, and how she made decisions about whether the new books should meet teachers where they were, or take them where she thought they should be? She raises the importance of building the capacity of the next generation of teachers and curriculum specialists.

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).