Professor Linda Herrera on a school visit in Cairo, Egypt, in 2018.

Professor of EPOL Linda Herrera has played a key role in documenting the sweeping educational reform taking place in Egypt.

Linda Herrera has spent much of her time as an academician doing what many professors do: writing books and articles for peer-reviewed journals.

Which is great—in fact, it’s a staple of scholarly life.

But Herrera found herself yearning for different forms of communicating ideas, believing there were better ways to build and spread knowledge about educational change.

She found one such way when, from 2018 to 2020, she launched and served as director of the research and documentation project for Egypt’s Education 2.0 reform. (And though the project was formally closed in Egypt as the result of COVID-19 in 2020, Herrera’s work on it has unabatedly continued.)

Education 2.0 refers to the Ministry of Education’s efforts to build a new education system in Egypt from K-12 with the aim of changing the culture of learning and upending the emphasis on exams. It is grounded in skills-based and multidisciplinary approaches and fully integrates digital tools, platforms, and competencies from grade 4.  The reform includes curriculum redesign, teacher training, and digital transformation, and is aligned with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 on education.

Need to Share Resources

“I’m at a stage professionally where I’m no longer satisfied just by collecting information, interpreting it, and writing articles or books about it,” says Herrera, a professor in the Education Policy, Organization and Leadership Department in the College of Education. “I think it’s really important for us in education to share primary source resources and to make information about the ideas guiding educational change accessible, whether through video, text, infographics, whatever it takes.  Because to reimagine and improve our education systems requires huge, collective, and creative efforts.

“I’m a strong proponent of open access knowledge, especially of policy materials which may be in the public domain but are difficult to find. Researchers often guard these materials in a proprietary way. But we in education need to have a more public-minded approach. When other researchers and practitioners look at and work with a set of source materials, they may come up with interpretations or applications other than my own. And that’s welcome and necessary.”

Launched YouTube Channel, Website, Writing Book

Herrera’s work for much of the past six years has revolved around freely sharing resources. In 2020, she established a YouTube channel that features 71 videos about Education 2.0, including 21 original oral history highlights videos with policymakers that she produced. Last fall, she launched a website with materials in English and Arabic that houses all of the new curricula frameworks, textbooks, and teachers’ guides for grades K-6, and the key policy documents that underpin the reform.

Herrera is also working on a book that will cover the history of Education 2.0 and include the full renditions of the oral history interviews with the key policymakers. The book will be an open-access, edited book. She also plans to leave the full archive of the 2.0 reform in the main library at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The result of Herrera’s efforts these past six years is a wealth of resources—all of them free—available to teachers, historians, people working in international education development (there are dozens of NGOs, INGOs, and private companies that work directly in education reform), and scholars.

“These are labors of love,” she says.

Huge Digital Transformation

Besides the aforementioned goals—including skills-based, multidisciplinary learning—Education 2.0 is making huge strides in digital transformation. For example, the Egyptian Knowledge Bank, established in 2016, is “a massive, curated online library that contains the contents of 120 databases from 31 international publishers, available free of charge to any Egyptian with a national ID,” Herrera says. “There are portals for higher education, for research, for students from K-12. The bank has videos, materials, books, and it’s all completely free. We need to better understand how individual learners use this resource and its role in the larger reform.”

Egypt’s Education System is Critical in the Arab World

Egypt’s Education 2.0 is an important undertaking for many reasons, Herrera says—including Egypt’s place among Arab countries.

“Egypt is the largest country in the Arab world by far,” she says, “and it’s an extremely important country in terms of its education system. It exports not only teachers and books but ideas to other Arab countries.”

Her website gets hits from Europe, North America, China, but above all from several Arab countries, including Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, to name a few. “I can tell by the website analytics that visitors are looking mainly at the curriculum frameworks, textbooks, and policy documents,” Herrera explains.

Need to Document Reform

It’s essential to document such a sweeping, ambitious reform, Herrera notes, to record how the Egyptian system has navigated the historic changes around things like digital transformation, student-centered learning, and blended learning.

“The reform harbors big ideas and a grand vision, though it has encountered a lot of problems and opposition. It’s important to document the challenges, and how some ideas have been derailed,” she says.

Sharing in Another Way: Through Mentoring

Besides playing a critical role in documenting the reform, Herrera is sharing her expertise in another way: mentoring.

“A lot of what I’ve been doing is mentoring and supporting younger researchers—master’s students, doctoral students, early career professionals,” she says. “I have worked with graduate students here at the University of Illinois, and a number of Egyptian researchers who have contributions in the forthcoming book.”

Mentoring is important, she says, “because the field is rapidly changing and we need to support the next generation of researchers. Education is moving in new, untested directions, and we have to keep alive important questions about the ethics of education, fairness, and justice, and in the face of ever more intense special interest pressures, the need to preserve education as a public good.  So, I hope to do work that can help advance emerging generations, get them thinking about these critical questions and prepare them to eventually lead the way.”

Another issue that Herrera believes academicians need to consider is how their research reaches their audiences.

“We in academia are a bit late to reward or encourage research that is not text-based. Writing is still very important, but students are increasingly learning through means of audio, video, and images.”

She points to her own use of YouTube, and notes that other researchers try to disseminate their work through podcasts, TikTok, websites, infographics, and other means. 

“It’s important for us to use different methods and platforms to share our work and engage with our colleagues and peers,” she says.