Copyright

Linda Herrer; Heba Shama;

Published On

2025-11-17

Page Range

pp. 437–456

Language

  • English

Print Length

20 pages

25. The Rise, Fall, and Aftermath of Take-Home Research Projects

  • Linda Herrera (author)
  • Heba Shama (author)
Chapter of: Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt(pp. 437–456)
In March 2020, schools across Egypt closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Ministry of Education and Technical Education (MOETE) cancelled the traditional end-of-year in-school exams in the transitional years of Grades 3-9 and replaced them with a take-home research project. The very idea of a project went against deeply engrained norms and practices around assessments. This chapter traces the rise, fall, and aftermath of the research projects. It draws on official Ministry communication and social media monitoring combined with in-depth interviews with teachers, parents, and students. Rather than judge this experiment in assessments in simple terms of ‘success’ or ‘failure’, the projects allow us to understand the agility of the predatory education marketplace, the prevalence of a ‘people versus the state’ ethos, how cultures of learning change from the top down and bottom up, and ways that behaviors that begin online spread into mainstream culture and alter education practices.

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).

Heba Shama

(author)

Heba Shama holds an M.A. in Anthropology and Development Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Bachelor’s in Architectural Engineering from the American University in Cairo. A development professional with expertise in sustainable community development, policymaking, heritage documentation, and social inclusion in the Arab region, she has held key positions at the United Nations, including Officer for the Agenda 2030 and SDGs Coordination Cluster at UNESCWA, and Programme Coordinator at UNESCO’s Regional Office for Arab States. Her research interests include policymaking in the Arab region, heritage and socio-economic studies, and ethnographic methods.