The article highlights the link between digitization and political participation in three Middle Eastern countries: Egypt, Kuwait, and Tunisia. The role of the Internet and social media in political engagement is thoroughly discussed from a historical-comparative perspective. Using micro and macro level data, the study analyzes the usage of new online technologies and online political participation.
The findings provide valuable insights for understanding the intricate nature of online political participation and the paradox between digital engagement and traditional political involvement. Despite the expansion of digital media, traditional political interest and participation has decreased. Egypt and Kuwait demonstrate advanced stages of digitization with widespread Internet access, while Tunisia’s progress is varied.
This paper reports on recent developments of the Critical Action Learning Exchange (Carvalho et al., 2021), an international community of educators who seek to respond to social and environmental issues that affect their students. We report on an international design workshop that engaged a cohort of teachers in designing Critical Action Learning activities for their students in the Summer of 2023. Participants (n=39) completed 16 curriculum designs for grade levels from kindergarten to university, addressing a broad range of socio-environmental issues and adopting diverse approaches, such as Arts-Based Critical Action, Community Engagement, Critical Making, Games for Critical Action, and Storytelling. This paper examines our Professional Development model, together with an analysis of teacher participants’ ideas and their design products. We investigate what forms of scaffolding can facilitate the changes of practice needed for teachers to become critical action educators and support their Critical Action Learning designs.
