CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The Egyptian protesters of the Arab Spring had numbers, excitement and social media, but they could not make democracy happen.
Linda Herrera, a University of Illinois education professor, thinks one reason is that they did not know how.
She’s hoping to help change that with a new educational website in five languages – launched today (Jan. 25) on the fifth anniversary of the protest that started the Egyptian revolution.
It’s called Democracy Dialogue and its unique initial content is six short videos – with four more soon to come – drawn from a six-hour conversation in November 2012 between two prominent figures: Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and leading voice at that time in Egypt’s democratic opposition, and Rajmohan Gandhi, a peace activist, grandson and biographer of the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, and a research professor (now emeritus) at the University of Illinois.
Their conversation was in English, but additional versions of the videos have subtitles and transcripts in Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Urdu. And Herrera hopes that future content for the site will have multiple translations as well.
In the videos, ElBaradei and Gandhi talk in idealistic terms about democracy and political change, but they’re also very pragmatic, said Herrera, director of the Global Studies in Education program at the U. of I., who lived and taught in Egypt for 17 years and has studied its youth and social media culture.
“In addition to grand humanistic and universal ideas about justice, equality, human dignity and global security, they also provide very grounded, practical guidelines on how to build sustainable movements that will outlast the euphoria and channel the energy of the streets,” she said.
Her first goal in producing the videos was to create material for online global education classes on themes around democracy, education and global citizenship, but she also had a wider audience in mind. All the videos are available not only on the website, but on YouTube, through channels for each of the five languages.
To appeal to a younger audience, the videos don’t focus just on the two men talking, but incorporate music, historical video footage, photos and other elements, Herrera said.
“The audience I want to reach isn’t necessarily reading a lot, but they are watching video content, including things that are thought-provoking and serious. So I’m trying to find ways to create material that aligns with my idea of ‘social media public pedagogy.’ I’m aiming to make videos with substantial content – videos that are relevant to contemporary politics and movements, but that also go into history, ideas and theory in ways that can engage a younger and more general audience.”
It was almost by accident that Herrera was able to bring together ElBaradei and Gandhi in 2012, thanks to several fortuitous connections on campus and in Egypt. Funding from the university and the College of Education supported the trip and the filming.
Herrera was already involved in research on the role of social media in the Arab Spring, which would result in a 2014 book, and was seeing the limits of social media and what the activists were lacking.
“One of the things that came out of the Egyptian uprising was the power of new communications and media to spread ideas, to plant the seeds for change, but they didn’t go very deep,” Herrera said. The activists had mastered the use of social media and certain marketing techniques for reaching and mobilizing large numbers, she said, but were less able to organize a sustained movement and effect real political change.
This eventually brought Herrera to the idea for the Democracy Dialogue project. She spent two years educating herself on video editing and then producing the videos, all six to nine minutes long. She also recruited a team of international graduate students in education to provide subtitles and transcripts in the four other languages.
“Throughout the world, we are witnessing a change in educational systems away from humanities and the arts and toward more market-driven and technocratic-centered models of learning,” Herrera said. “We need to find ways to maintain a robust commitment to, and constant reimagining of, democratic, public and popular education. For if we lose the ideal for democracy and education for the common good, our democratic systems and structures will go by the wayside.”