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

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Sociology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Zayed, Hany

Contributors dc:contributor

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

• Education
• Technology
• Egypt

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Hany Zayed

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

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

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F120520