Team
Nourhan Moussa, Nathan Thomas
In this program, the Fellows are planning to design and implement a collaborative action project based on one or more of the topics discussed in the United States and Egypt. The project works to improve mutual understanding among Egyptians and Americans.
Education as Dialogue
Social Entrepreneurship
For youth and adults who want to engage and excel in the global educational arena and technological age, we offer the Gabr Summer Institute. This Institute provides well rounded primary and secondary education with comprehensive digital-age awareness to participants in need. Unlike public schools and segmented technology centers, we have an inclusive hub to assist with the needs of an underserved community.
Goal
- To act on the widening gap of educational opportunity between the disenfranchised and the high unemployment rate amongst college graduates through a 2-week summer program for students and parents & a 1-week long professional development program for educators.
- To increase dialogue regarding the growing presence of technology in our daily lives through the creation of an online forum to engage participants in a yearly conference on the highly discussed technological issues of the year.
- To engage Egyptian and US citizens in the facilitation of the action project.
- The project will give participants a uniquely powerful platform for an East-West dialogue of academic fidelity, cultural values from cradle to career, and a greater understanding of mutual US/Egyptian challenges
Issue
- New research supported by the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation[i] states that parents who take an active role in early childhood education and proper infant health care can help their child live their best life story. However, the opportunity to provide the aforementioned advantages is not in favor of the impoverished child that needs it most.
- New statistics in the US and Egypt sheds light on the fact that higher education is becoming more expensive and increasingly failing to provide the majority of students with improved job prospects. In fact, unemployment is higher for US and Egyptian graduates versus non-graduates.[ii]
- With the US educating an ever diversifying population of young students and Egypt maintaining the largest public school population of the Middle East and North Africa, a dialogue on the challenges and solutions to education is timely and necessary.
- Technology is becoming an ever-growing part of today’s modern classroom. In fact[iii], all high school students in Arkansas are required to take an online class before graduation. Teachers of all disciplines will benefit from workshops geared toward the future of classroom technology and most importantly the use and security of that data.
Challenges
- Selecting the starting age group for the summer program.
- Isolating a dynamic speaker and participants for the teacher workshop.
- Securing space, food, and funding for events.
“The process of education thus can be construed broadly as humanity’s unique methods of acquiring, transmitting, and producing knowledge for interpreting and acting upon the world. In the broadest sense, education underlies every human group’s ability to adapt to its environment. Effective education allows a group to continually adapt and thereby reproduce the conditions of its existence…” – Bradley Levinson