The ‘digital transformation’ of Egyptian secondary education: From technological reason to technological realism

Zayed, Hany

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120520 Copy

Description

Title

The ‘digital transformation’ of Egyptian secondary education: From technological reason to technological realism

Author(s)

Zayed, Hany

Issue Date

2023-04-20

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Bayat, Asef

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Bayat, Asef

Committee Member(s)

• Herrera, Linda
• Dill, Brian
• Gille, Zsuzsa
• Cuno, Kenneth

Department of Study

Sociology

Discipline

Sociology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Education
• Technology
• Egypt

Abstract

In late 2018, Egypt began implementing an audacious reform program involving the ‘digital transformation’ of general secondary education. This included provisioning digital assessments, digital devices, digital content, digital learning platforms, digital infrastructure, and digital surveillance. Located within a state-wide project to build a New Digital Egypt and accelerated by Covid-19, this educational digitalization was encrusted with a discourse of technological essentialism, utopianism, solutionism, anti-humanism and inevitablism. In this dissertation, I ask how digital technologies are changing and reproducing educational institutions, learning and assessment processes, and social relations in Egyptian secondary education. As a critical sociology of educational technologies, this dissertation moves away from idealized visions of positive technological transformations. Instead, it examines the empirical realities, unintended consequences, and politics of those techno-educational reforms, situating them within their political-economic and socio-historical contexts. Building on fifteen-months of ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt, I argue that digital technologies have been facilitating the platformization of Egyptian secondary education, embedding private actors in education, dissipating the pedagogical functions of schools, and pushing for an individualized form of learning. Nonetheless, digital technologies have simultaneously been facilitating the emergence of a collaborative ethic between students, enabling novel forms of digital collective cheating, instigating collective action and resistance practices in a youth subversive counterculture, and exacerbating inequalities based on internet access, data limitations, and technological capital. With those insights, I contend that digital technologies are not singular, stable and neutral, but plural, changing and political. Inserted in a particular socio-historical milieu, they do not necessarily solve the educational problems they intend to solve. Rather, they are used in creative ways, engender new problems, have unforeseen consequences, create winners and losers, and undermine the envisioned ‘transformation.’ Ultimately, digital technologies do not necessarily transform education, both in causing an immense disruption and in causing a good change.

Graduation Semester

2023-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Hany Zayed

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