AUC student Lena Boraei teamed up with community initiative Athar Lina to engage kids in local history through cards.
The educational card game Al Foora brings new meaning to the word “monumental.” The game, created by AUC student Boraei, teaches children about important antiquities, highlighting 30 significant landmarks in Cairo’s Al Khalifa neighborhood.
Players compete by placing down the top card in their hand and comparing numerical categories about the monuments on their cards such as “size” and “century.” The player with the highest number in a given category wins that round. Boraei, a history and graphic design junior, spent hours researching each building. She developed the deck as part of an internship with Athar Lina community initiative.
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AUC awardees at the conference include:
Shahira Fahmy '91, '00, professor, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication
"Our research journey began amidst the Gaza war turmoil. The study is based on interviews conducted with 18 Palestinian journalists in Gaza, aiming to unveil the challenges and nuances of reporting on the Israel-Gaza War that began on October 7, 2023. Through our findings, we provide insights into the evolving landscape of war coverage in the digital era, highlighting ethical dilemmas, safety concerns and personal struggles faced by journalists reporting during conflict." – Shahira Fahmy
Mohamed Salama (MA '22):, PhD candidate, University of Maryland
Menna Elhosary (MA'24), teaching assistant, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication
"The ultimate goal of this assignment is to enhance media students' fact-checking skills, especially within the context of AI-generated misinformation. The assignment focuses on AI-generated misinformation rather than human-generated content, which is an area that is still underexplored." – Menna Elhosary '
Sara Tarek 17, '21, PhD candidate, Universidad de Murcia, the University of Murcia in Spain
First place - Guido H. Stempel III Award for Journalism and Mass Communication Research for her paper, "The Instagram Effect: Unveiling the Influence on Young Egyptian Women's Body Image and Self-Objectification." The paper examines the effect of Instagram use on young Egyptian women’s body image and how it relates to self-objectification, how women get dissatisfied and ashamed of their bodies, how the comments they receive on their Instagram content affect them positively or negatively, and put pressure on them to acquire a better body shape. The award is part of the Commission on Graduate Education division in AEJMC .
"I focused on Instagram because it is still relatively a new tool, and its effects on body image and self-objectification, especially for young women, is still not clear. The findings contribute to our understanding of social media's impact on body image and emphasize the need for awareness and education regarding the effects of Instagram use among female users in Egypt." - Sara Tarek
Omneya Mohamed Nagib (MA '19) , PhD candidate, University of Texas at Austin
AEJMC-Mass Communication and Society Division Diversity and Inclusion Career Development Fellowship for "outstanding academic accomplishment and potential for continued achievement as scholars and/or media professionals" addressing issues of diversity, equity,m inclusion and accssilbity within the meida industry
Presenting research tackling contemporary topics in the field, our faculty, students and alumni are shining at the upcoming Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference to be held in Philadelphia from August 8 to 11.
If you’ve ever crammed for a final last minute and put on your favorite playlist to keep you focused, you’re not alone. But does listening to music while you work actually help your performance? Undergraduate students Yasmin Hamoud, Mariam Bourham and Mahmoud Malatawy’s project looked into this question, taking them all the way to Long Beach, California to present their work conducted as part of the Cognitive Psychology class taught by Jacquelyn Berry, assistant professor of psychology.
Unique in its focus on bilingualism, Hamoud, Bourham’s and Malatawy’s study had three groups: the first listened to mid-tempo then fast-tempo music in Arabic, the second listened to mid-tempo and fast-tempo music in Russian, and the third had no music at all. The participants, all of whom were Arabic and English speakers, completed both a logic-based task and a visual task while listening, and the students measured their performance and compared it with that of the other groups. They found that music negatively impacted performance irrespective of the type of task, the language, or the speed.
“In the past, there have been similar studies, but by focusing on English and Arabic bilinguals, we were able to contribute to an understudied part of the field,” Bourham says.
What makes studying bilinguals specific? “Bilinguals have rather different brains,” explains Bourham. “For example, they have more inhibitory powers: If I'm speaking in English, I might have better abilities to inhibit the Arabic side of my brain, and vice versa.”
The students also enjoyed the practical side of their work. ““For me, the most fun part was watching the psychological effects of the experiment, not only whether the participants were able to complete the test, but just examining whether they were agitated, distracted or felt accomplished.”says Hamoud.
Through their research, the students had the opportunity to present their findings at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in Long Beach, California, with funding from a grant from the University.
“AUC really gave us the creative and academic freedom to research what we’re passionate about,” says Hamoud. “Being selected for the conference was a very surreal moment because I have always wanted to be able to present my research abroad.”
Their focus on bilingualism helped the students build community while at the conference. “Our poster actually gained a lot of traction, especially from bilinguals, which was really interesting,” says Bourham. “Many Arab Americans stopped at our poster, and we connected with a lot of other researchers through that. They really identified with our research, and I felt proud to be conveying an aspect of research that hasn’t really yet been covered.”
Mentoring and networking were also beneficial for the students. “There were a lot of professors at the conference from different disciplines, like architecture or chemistry, who would give us advice about how to continue our research. I felt really proud of the work we had done and demonstrating how interesting psychology can be,” says Hamoud.
Overall, the conference opened doors for the student to grow and develop both personally and professionally. “Through this experience, I got to explore the opportunities that AUC provides to people who want to present their research abroad,” Bourham says. “Afterward, we were invited to seek out additional conferences here in Cairo. Our initial opportunity had a domino effect, which had a huge impact on us.”
A major transformation lies ahead for the AUC Library, which holds the largest English-language research collection in Egypt, with the help of a $2 million American Schools and Hospitals Abroad (ASHA) grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). After the upgrade, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2025, the AUC Library will include a digital exhibit corridor, active collaboration zones, new seating options, communal spaces, planters and a cafe.
“This revamp will launch learning into the future, with design requirements that enable effective, next-generation, collaborative learning,” said Hoda Mostafa, director of AUC’s Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT) and principal investigator of the USAID/ASHA Learning Transformation grant, alongside co-principal investigator Lamia Eid '88, ’92, dean of the University’s Libraries and Learning Technologies.
This ASHA grant is the latest of three awarded to CLT by USAID, totaling $3.7 million. The previous two funded the development of new learning spaces on both the New Cairo and Tahrir Square campuses: digitally empowered classrooms in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (2021) as well as the construction of additional hybrid learning spaces, a data visualization lab and dual delivery classrooms (2022). In Fall 2023, 11 of these classrooms were launched, where 92 faculty members are teaching more than 1,700 students across a variety of courses.
“This revamp will launch learning into the future, with design requirements that enable effective, next-generation, collaborative learning."
“By reimagining our learning spaces, we are creating a landscape that we hope will enable our goal of accelerating transformative teaching as well as active and engaged learning at AUC,” said Mostafa, who is the principal investigator for the three USAID-funded ASHAawards; AUC Learning Landscape Transformation. “The impact of the three awards extends to our entire AUC community, where thousands of our students, faculty and staff will experience futuristic, formal and informal, collaborative learning spaces.”
Read more about these projects here.
Spanning 45 years, AUC’s partnership with USAID/ASHA has fostered innovation, scientific research, education and economic development in the Egyptian community, withapproximately $35 million awarded grants to date.
The three latest awards are an additional part of the legacy of Aziza Ellozy ’64, ’67, adviser to the provost for transformative learning and teaching at AUC who previously served as founding director of CLT. Ellozy has spearheaded innovative teaching and learning initiatives at the University for more than 20 years.
The AUC Library will include innovative areas and facilities funded by USAID.
