Copyright

Linda Herrera

Published On

2025-11-17

Page Range

pp. 373–390

Language

  • English

Print Length

18 pages

22. Making Education Entertaining

Interview with Mai Magdy

  • Linda Herrera (author)
Chapter of: Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt(pp. 373–390)
When schools across the country closed during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the Ministry of Education and Technical Education hired a production company to produce and disseminate class lessons via television and YouTube. The two channels, Madrasetna 1 (for Grades 4-6) and Madrasetna 2 (for Grades 7-9) would become the Ministry’s media arm to support the idea of an ‘open school’. Madrasetna 3 later followed for Thanaweya Amma revisions for Grade 12. Mai Magdy, the General Manager of Madrasetna TV, Sky Production, talks about the process of working with public school teachers to recreate classes for television. She reflects on the responsibilities and rewards of producing video for educational purposes and talks about the need for more children’s educational programming or ‘entertaining education’.

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).