Suchergebnisse

Holocaust Education in Egyptian Seconday Schools is a thesis completed by Marisa Claire Jones under the supervision of Dr. Joel Bein in at the American University in Cairo. The aim of this project was to determine how the Holocaust is taught in Egyptian secondary schools, with a focus on materials, textbooks and instructional style used in this process. To gain data and information for the thesis, background information was collected on the phenomenon of Holocaust denial and on the topic of Holocaust education in Germany, Israel and Egypt, involving the role played by political and ideological currents dominant in these societies at certain junctures in shaping the way school curriculums portray the Holocaust. I determined through the course of textbook analysis, teacher interviews and classroom surveys that students enrolled in private schools where the curriculum, textbooks and teaching staff are partially or totally separated from the national history curriculum have a greater understanding and more open recognition of the Holocaust than children who attend public, or "national" schools, as I commonly refer to them. This may be due in large part to the inaccurate and distorted image of Jews and Jewish history depicted in the national curriculum's history, which culminates in an open denial that the Holocaust occurred. The pattern of increased Holocaust coverage in schools removed from the government's curriculum and standards was pronounced although not absolute. My research rested on the data I gathered and the interviews I conducted from six different Cairo schools, including a private Islamic school, several prestigious private schools, a German school following the German national curriculum, a school teaching the content of the Egyptian national history curriculum and from a thorough examination of the national system's history lessons as presented in two commonly-used textbooks. I followed these interviews with a survey of freshman students at the American University in Cairo which looked at the relationship between the type of secondary school they had attended and their grasp and opinions on the Holocaust.

For many years there have been well-funded project opportunities for developing educational innovations, both pedagogical and technological, to fulfil the educational ambitions of national governments and European agencies. Projects have been funded on the basis of competitive bidding against themes identified by funders. Calls for funding typically exhibit bold rhetoric as to their ambition and consequently bold claims are made in response. It is not untypical for the results of these projects to fall short of their rhetoric. During the process of project delivery, there can arise what is termed "unintended functionalism" where the fulfilment of the project contract through the regulatory instruments of project management overrides critical challenge of the objectives and rhetorical claims, or reflection about theoretical assumptions. Two contrasting projects are examined to explore this: ITEC, a large-scale technological innovation and implementation project involving schools throughout Europe; and INCLUD-ED, a research project to describe successful educational practice around inclusion. An analysis is presented which draws on Searle's concept of 'status functions' to explain anomalies between the declarations concerning the objectives, technologies and concepts of a project and the evidence of project outcomes. It is argued that unintended functionalism arises as a result of common constraints of project regulation which bear upon all project stakeholders. The contrast between ITEC and INCLUD-ED presents an opportunity to ask whether and how, in the light of better knowledge about the dynamics of constraints, the pathology of unintended functionalism might be avoided.