27. Teachers in Search of Their Identity: A View from Ismailia during Times of Change

Mohamed Elsayed and Menna Ahmed

©2025 Mohamed Elsayed & Menna Ahmed, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0489.27

1. Are Teachers the Problem?

In 2016, the ‘Year of the Youth’, the Egyptian presidency sponsored the first National Youth Conference in Sharm El Sheikh (Egypt State Information Service 2016). During the conference, President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi emphasized that the country was preparing for a total reform of the education system to meet the country’s economic needs and challenges and contribute to a national renaissance (Abdelrahman 2016). A range of education models from different countries were under discussion. The President was particularly looking for a model that would ‘build the whole human being’ by instilling certain morals, knowledge, and behaviors in pupils (Sada Elbalad 2016). However, teachers did not appear to be an essential part of this plan. In a speech about this planned Egyptian renaissance, the President talked about building an elite cadre that would bring the rest of society forward. He said,

In 2017, the President appointed Dr. Tarek Shawki as the Minister of Education and Technical Education (2017-2022) to lead the ambitious undertaking to build a ‘new education system’ or ‘Education 2.0’. When the reform was first announced, teachers expected to be consulted and engaged throughout the process (Afifi 2018). They soon found out that not only were they not going to be consulted, but they were expected to make sacrifices. President El-Sisi specifically told teachers to refrain from asking for any improvements to their situation, particularly around salary, because the state was economically poor and could not afford such things (Extranews 2018; Mirshak 2019).

Instead, the top-down reforms attempted to restructure the education system with a new vision and philosophy heavily oriented towards digital change (El Tawil 2018; Masrawy 2018). The El-Sisi government had been turning to technological solutions across society as the cure for deep-rooted and complex problems such as inefficiency, corruption, taxes, poverty and inequality, and low-quality education. Education technologies were being employed to ‘neutralize the human factor’ by, for example, bypassing teachers in things such as grading or delivering lessons. As the Minister presented the public with a vision and roadmap for the new system, it became increasingly clear that teachers were marginal to the reform and often presented as an impediment to it. The decline of the teaching profession and the scapegoating of teaches is not something new. It has been occurring over decades as the very meaning of ‘education’ has progressively lost its association with knowledge and learning for the greater social good and been more tied to performance on tests and growing markets (Herrera 2022: 139-141).1

Tarek Shawki, a ‘techno-optimist’, someone who believes there are neat technological solutions to complex social problems, integrated tech platforms, services, and tools into the system to compensate for teacher shortages and overcome problems with poor teacher performance (Herrera 2022: 14). For instance, he said, ‘We have provided new learning resources to compensate for the inefficient teachers’ (cited in Zakaria 2021). He also said,

The Ministry invested immense financial and technical resources into new platforms and devices such as the Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB), the lessons platform Madrasty, and the tablets for high school students (see Chapter 23 in this volume). Teachers simply could not keep up with the influx of new platforms and initiatives. The digital transformation policy in education changes the role of the teacher to that of a ‘facilitator’, and this is supposed to ‘liberate’ students from the traditional student-teacher relationship (Abdelhalim 2020). Teachers understood this as a strategy to make them redundant.

The Minister also disparaged teachers on several occasions and put them on the defensive. For example, in a parliamentary session he proclaimed that he only needed 20% of currently employed teachers (Al-Quds al-Arabi 2017), and that paying teachers’ salaries was a form of social aid (ma’ewnih ijtma’eyh) akin to charity (Sobh 2017). The Minister was also reported to have said, ‘Half of the teachers are thieves (haramiyah), and the other half are inefficient’ (Alquds 2017). While this latter statement has been disputed, the fact remains that teachers felt humiliated and unappreciated as the government rolled out the new reform and its ‘digital solutions’.

During an education committee meeting of the Egyptian parliament in 2017, the Minister stated that teachers who were ready and capable of coping with the changes would receive support and training from a company called Teachers First. The training, funded through a World Bank loan (World Bank 2018) would go to those clever teachers (al-mo`alem al-shater) who would not need much support but would ‘quickly know the way by themselves’ (cited in Ali 2017). He did not define what he meant by ‘those clever teachers’, but many teachers took this as a slight.

Egypt has historically been a highly centralized state with political, economic, and cultural power concentrated in the capital. Consequently, Cairo has come to represent ‘Egypt’ for many decision-makers. Much of the educational research is also centered on Cairo. Under-researched provincial regions have often been treated as one homogenous block, regardless of their differences, thereby reinforcing geographical power imbalances. This blanket treatment of different regions and contexts gets replicated in the implementation of education reforms, which tend to ignore specific social and cultural differences, such as those between urban and rural areas. The governorate of Ismailia is a largely rural region except for the city of Ismailia which has a population of about 1,400,000. It is situated on the western bank of the Suez Canal, 120 kilometers from Cairo. Despite having better material conditions than other governorates in Egypt, it still suffers from higher rates of unemployment and lower incomes than the capital (see Fig. 27.1).

Fig. 27.1 Map of Egypt with Ismailia circled. Source: Nationsonline.org, https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/egypt_map.htm

This chapter is based on oral history interviews with four public school teachers from Ismailia. In our selection of teachers, we took into consideration various life experiences, career stages, and rural and urban contexts. We carried out between two to four interviews with each participant throughout 2022. The goal was to build a picture of how these teachers experienced their profession during the transition to the new education system.

Among the teachers represented, three are male and one is female. Two are from villages and two are from the city. We use pseudonyms to protect their identities.

Mr. Bahaa is a recently retired biology teacher. He used to teach at a mixed-language high school in the city of Ismailia. Over his career, Mr. Bahaa participated in many professional development (PD) training courses, including one in the UK. Even though he is retired, he remains active as a private tutor with an average number of eight to ten students per session. He is a self-learner in his field, familiar with technologies such as tablets and online platforms, and also well-versed in traditional resources.

Mr. Halim is an early career Arabic teacher working in a village. He used to teach in a high school for boys and currently teaches in a middle school. He derives his main source of income from giving private lessons to the high school students from his previous school. Before becoming a teacher, he worked as a goods carrier and computer technician. His experience in using technology gives him the confidence to adapt to the new education technologies, unlike many of his colleagues who have limited skills and familiarity with them. Mr. Halim regards the teaching profession as providing him a source of respect and social status in his village.

Ms. Hanan is based in the city of Ismailia. Her long career teaching math in middle school spans three decades. She currently teaches in two schools. She has taught in all male schools in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and in all female schools in a local village. She does not give private lessons and plans to retire within a few years. She is familiar with technology in general but is not interested or experienced in using it in her work. After working thirty years in the system, her average monthly salary in 2022 was 5000 EGP (the equivalent of 170 USD), hardly a livable wage.

Mr. Sabry grew up in a village and currently works as a high school math teacher in a local public school. He is simultaneously pursuing a Ph.D. in agricultural science and is deeply involved in the farming community. He does not work as a private tutor. His village lacks a digital infrastructure despite not being far from Ismailia city or the Suez Canal area, and he is neither familiar with nor interested in using technology.

Computers and other digital technologies have been a regular feature of reform agendas in Egyptian education going back to the 1990s. Computers were introduced to public schools starting 1994 (Bakr 2011). But since 2014, the drive towards digitization experienced a leap as the government of Egypt sought to digitally transform all major state sectors (see Chapter 23 in this volume). By and large, teachers were not prepared for the scale and speed of the digital transformation of education.

Mr. Halim was frustrated by the lack of teacher preparation. He declared, ‘It felt like the Ministry was taking the teachers to the sea without teaching them how to swim’. He was specifically referring to the Ministry’s decision in 2018 to issue a Samsung tablet to all Grade 10 students and integrate new technologies into classrooms. High school teachers learned about these initiatives during the summer of 2018, shortly before the start of the academic year. When they returned to school in 2018, teachers found their classrooms fitted with smart boards but had no idea how to use them. Many of the teachers in his village did not have smartphones and had never even used a computer. He said with exasperation, ‘Those teachers were supposed to change their old methods and use these new technologies and smart boards. Can you imagine that?!’ Some teachers took matters into their own hands. One of his colleagues hung an old chalk board over the smart board so he could explain the lessons to his students in the ‘old fashioned’ way. But Mr. Halim lamented that this kind of behavior made teachers look ‘helpless and ignorant’ in front of their students.

Not all teachers were left in the dark. A select number of high school teachers received trainings prior to the start of the 2018 year, but Mr. Halim was not one of them. He asked, ‘How did the Ministry determine who would receive the training? And what about the rest of us?’ Mr. Bahaa, being from Ismailia city, felt fortunate to have been identified to attend a short Teachers First training session. He appreciated and understood the new tools and tried to use them. During class time he made use of the smart board and streamed videos from the Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB), but he struggled to get the students’ attention. He said, ‘I was begging the students to sit still and pay attention, but with little success’. He felt his authority and influence in the classroom were further weakened after the Minister announced that students in high school would no longer be graded on attendance, which meant the little leverage class teachers had was gone.

The new system weakened the role of classroom teachers and had the unintended consequence of creating more demand for private tutors. Mr. Bahaa genuinely thought a specific aim of the reform was to sever teachers’ ties with their profession. He said, ‘Imagine the thing you think of as your only job in this life turns into a totally different role that you never signed up for’. Mr. Halim echoed this sentiment and said,

I want to tell you something. Nobody cares about what we teachers feel or what we are going through. Dr. Tarek doesn’t represent me, and he doesn’t represent the students. And we do not understand him. All I know is that when I go to school, I find new laws that have come suddenly from top to down. I do not know what is going on and I do not know what to tell my students.

The more seasoned teachers had seen years of technology ‘upgrades’ and remembered them as being mismanaged or generally ineffective. Ms. Hanan recalled an initiative in 2006 to ‘bring technology to the classroom’. She had to take a mandatory training in Microsoft Office and barely learned the basics before being told she had to lead the training of teachers in her district (this is called the cascade method of training). She said, ‘This was not serious training’.

Teachers and students have been introduced to one tech tool after another, often making the job of teaching more difficult. Mr. Shokry said that tablets were simply distracting students who ‘kept playing movies while we were teaching’. This experience was shared by Mr. Bahaa who found it impossible to teach while students had their tablets in the classroom. Even though these teachers eventually received training on how to use the tablets and smart boards, they nonetheless felt ill-equipped to do so effectively. There were also problems with the online platforms. Mr. Bahaa described his experience accessing the Ministry’s website, downloading resources, and connecting with teachers as very difficult and a waste of time. Meanwhile, Ms. Hanan who had to use the Learning Management Slatform (LMS) Edmodo during the COVID-19 pandemic, described it as very confusing. She only used it a couple of times with the assistance of her daughter, and never had any contact with her students on it. Mr. Shokry said that during the pandemic when schools were closed, he had almost no communication with his students on any platform.

Unlike in Ismailia city, schools in the village were especially ill-equipped for digital transformation due to the lack of proper equipment, a weak internet infrastructure, and high rates of poverty. Even the more tech-savvy village teachers like Mr. Halim admitted, ‘If I had not received technology training before, I would have been very frustrated with the Minister’. Mr. Bahaa tried to use the EKB but found it ‘very confusing and complicated’. He said that students who accessed the EKB were ‘shocked and overwhelmed’ by the amount of information and questions.

In an earlier wave of technological reforms in 2014, the Ministry selected Mr. Halim to participate in a professional development training program on computers. He had to travel three hours to Zagazig city. On completing the program, he became responsible for training groups of local village teachers. The problem was, he found it nearly impossible to apply what he learned in the local schools since the necessary equipment was either absent, obsolete, or locked away in a storage area to protect it from ‘damage by students’. The village itself had only two outdated computer service shops and poor Internet connectivity. Moreover, he found that teachers did not show an interest in these new tech-centered approaches due to the realities of their rural environment.

Ms. Hanan had a unique perspective because she worked in both urban and rural schools. She expressed how students in the village valued their opportunity to go to school and treated their teachers with a lot more respect. Even though traveling two or three times a week to the village school required a big effort and high cost on her part, she felt it was worth it. Teaching there filled her with a sense of satisfaction and appreciation. In contrast, when talking about the urban schools, she echoed Mr. Bahaa’s bitterness about how teacher professional development on technology and the new system had been neglected which led to students losing respect for them. She recalled how students mocked their teachers and sometimes even abused them physically and verbally.

In the initial years of the reform, the Minister Tarek Shawki made statements about teachers and parents being obstacles to realizing the fruits of the new education system due to ‘their inability to comprehend’ and embrace the new technology tools (Abu Zahra 2019). Though they struggled to use tools developed by the Ministry, they were more inclined to adopt free applications such as Zoom, Facebook Live, WhatsApp, and Facebook groups, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic when schools closed. Teachers talked about how technology was more relevant in their lives than ever, regardless of their age, place of residence, or cultural/economic background.

For example, Mr. Bahaa praised the efforts of biology teachers to initiate Facebook groups during the pandemic. In his view, these became more important than any official platform set up by the Ministry. Similarly, Mr. Bahaa relied mainly on Facebook groups to exchange views and information about the new exam system with teachers from across the country. WhatsApp also proved to be an extremely useful tool for information sharing and support between teachers. Mr. Halim used the application to organize his classes, share resources and assignments, and communicate directly with his students. He did not use the Ministry’s official Learning Management System Edmodo. Ms. Hanan also preferred WhatsApp over email or Edmodo to communicate with her colleagues during the pandemic. She joined groups where teachers shared views and advice about the reforms.

Zoom, Facebook Live, and WhatsApp with their synchronous features, provided teachers with a sense of the actual classroom, unlike the recorded videos and automated responses of the Ministry platforms ‘Madrasty’ and the EKB. Mr. Bahaa was even more creative by using the services of an exam application called ‘Ekhtebar’ to conduct and correct exams fast and efficiently while still discussing the answers with his students.

These examples illustrate the real schism between the Ministry’s plan for digital transformation on one side, and teachers’ reality and ingenuity on the other. Teachers adapted to the COVID-19 lockdowns and were creative in utilizing an array of solutions no matter their ages, social backgrounds, or locations, and proved capable of embracing various kinds of technology that suited their needs and circumstances. Free services through Facebook and WhatsApp groups were the actual ‘tech solutions’’ for teachers on the ground, rather than the more complex apps and less user-friendly platforms created and endorsed by the Ministry.

The Thanaweya Amma exam has long been a staple of the education system in Egypt. This combined high school graduation and university entrance exam has profoundly shaped the learning culture and economics of education. Despite some attempts to change the system, exams remain firmly at the center of the educational process.

When asked about if the Thanaweya Amma exams have changed since the reform, Mr. Halim sarcastically said that in his village, the students initially thought that they would take final exams on their tablets while sitting in a café. Students were looking forward to a change in the Thanaweya Amma which they all considered a nightmare. They hoped for a less complicated system but instead found the new exam questions confusing and complex. Because the infrastructure was not ready in time for the initial exams they had to take on the tablets, they experienced technical problems which caused them high degrees of anxiety. As Mr. Sabry explained, ‘The students were used to the paper exams, and this transition was scaring them’.

Another cause for anxiety was the new format of the exams which used multiple-choice questions (MCQs) combined with essay questions. Mr. Bahaa explained how the students at the beginning used to underestimate the new exams, thinking that they would simply be MCQs that could be randomly answered. He then realized that the style of the new questions was much more complicated than people originally thought. Questions required critical and analytical thinking skills rather than memorization. When asked if teachers needed to change their methods to prepare students for the new types of exam questions he answered,

Yes, for sure. Now I need to continuously connect the curriculum topics to the students and train them on how to understand the connections between the different topics in the same subject. I do not just train them to memorize everything, but to understand the questions. And this is really hard because it’s a skill that neither the teachers nor students were ever trained on.

The new exam system was supposed to tackle long-standing problems relating to cheating and exams. Cheating has regularly caused the government tremendous embarrassment (Independent 2020; Middle East Monitor 2018). The new exams were supposed to reduce the need for private tutoring. Tarek Shawki stated, ‘With the new education system, private tutors will be of no benefit, especially since the system will be based on continuous evaluation, not a final exam’. Despite such confident statements, the new system had the opposite effect, and the private tutor market has boomed in recent years (dmc 2019; TeN TV 2018).

When students faced the complexities of the new exam system, they rushed to private tutors whom they hoped would help them to achieve high grades and learn how to hack the new style of exam questions. As a private tutor himself, Mr. Bahaa started to feel useful again. He said, ‘Parents would come to me begging to help their kids because an exam was coming, and the students didn’t understand anything’.

Mr. Halim had a similar experience in his village. Students started looking for tutors who had a good reputation for using technology and could train the students on the new style of questions. Because of COVID-19, many private tutors began to offer classes and learning resources online. Those with ICT skills were at an advantage and many of these teachers were hugely successful. Some of the most successful online tutors used the Ministry’s online content. Mr. Halim and Mr. Bahaa both benefited from the new online resources. Mr. Halim’s nickname was ‘the octopus’ because of his multifaceted skills to use various tools, references, and applications to train the students. He used WhatsApp groups for discussions, Microsoft programs for delivering the lessons, and content from the EKB and other platforms for understanding the exam questions. Such skills were very rare in a small village which put him in high demand. Normally, village students would have to travel to Ismailia to get private lessons with such high demand teachers. Mr. Bahaa stressed that the pandemic showed everyone, even the Minister, that there is no alternative to the teacher. The prosperity of the private tutor market became the best evidence for this claim.

In the early years of the reform, teachers were deliberately alienated, underestimated, and made to feel that technology could replace them. Five years into the reform, the official discourse around teachers has softened. In his final months as Minister, Tarek Shawki’s tone changed. He even used religious language to describe teaching as the most beneficial and valuable profession to the people. He said, ‘The teacher’s impact on a child lasts for thirty years, this is something great’ (Abdelrahman 2022).

Our research with four teachers in rural and urban settings in Ismailia emphasized three things: 1. Technology is creating clear winners and losers and causing imbalances in the teaching profession; 2. Teachers are a crucial part of the educational process, especially in rural settings; and 3. Despite all the reforms and attempts to deemphasize the exams and change the system of private tutoring, private lessons are not only surviving but thriving.2 A viral video of a philosophy teacher’s motorcade of three fancy cars with hundreds of students cheering for him provides a pointed example of the supremacy of the private tutor over the dedicated humble schoolteacher (BBC 2022) (Fig. 27.2).

Fig. 27.2 Procession and bodyguards. A legendary reception for a philosophy teacher at one of the private lesson centers. Sada ElBalad, 20 July 2022, https://www.elbalad.news/5365406

Technology has exacerbated inequalities in the teaching profession. Teachers with cultural and social capital such as knowing English and using and following the latest technology platforms and applications are at a clear advantage. For many, technology in education is neither fair nor empowering, as many teachers and students are forced to use new tools without proper understanding or preparation. Some teachers, including the dedicated and gifted among them, are left feeling either redundant or left behind.

Teachers are struggling to prove their value and relevance in the age of digital transformation and are facing a challenging future. They are likely to become more individualistic and lose the bond connecting them as a social and professional group. Because of market dynamics, income gaps between teachers are now wider than ever. The inability to freely self-organize themselves in the current syndicate system and the restricted public sphere leaves them with limited options. Building a collective inclusive body and movement able to negotiate with the government for their rights and voices seems a very remote possibility.

Ignoring the potential to strengthen relationships between teachers and students, and the influence of the teachers on the student’s character, and vice versa, comes at a high cost. The reforms seem to be further eroding the teacher-student relationship and the role of the school. Imposing technology and minimizing human interaction strikes at the heart of the learning process, but the human factor is the very thing that needs vision to be preserved and improved.

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