“ Piracy can be socially just”: Maha Bali on her journey to open
I think openness can give, if you’re willing to give it.”
Piracy undoubtedly has a negative connotation but for most people from the Global South who have difficulty accessing resources, Maha makes a good argument why piracy can be a good thing. She speaks to Inspiring Open’s Betty Kankam-Boadu.
Maha Bali is an Associate Professor of Practice at the Centre for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. She has also done extensive work in the area of open pedagogy. Her job among other things is to support both students and professors in the teaching and learning process.
Bali comes from a family of medical doctors but she fancied studying computer science and actually took a shot at it. She unfortunately left this field because she found it to be very gendered.
“I was one of the best people in my class, but people always assume that the boys knew better,” she says. “If there was ever a problem they would ask the boys. Even my father, who was a very, very supportive father, and generally not sexist at all, always believed that he knew how to fix the computer better than I could.
Women’s rights in Egypt has a very long history, this notwithstanding, patriarchy is still the order of the day. Even though the oppression of women is common, Bali says it has not prevented women from speaking up about the situation.
Bali redirected her focus to teaching, a dream she had nurtured since 11.
Bali grew up in Kuwait, where she experienced the best of education. When her family moved back to Egypt, she realized the educational system paled in comparison to what she experienced in Kuwait.
Coming to Egypt, it was more of a mainstream, semi private type of education, but using the public curriculum, which was really, really poorly designed. It was very memorization based. Pretty useless. I had never been asked to memorise anything in my life, and here I was memorising these useless, useless facts and stuff that was hard for no reason.” Bali says.
Teaching and learning in both higher and lower education in Africa is fraught with so many challenges. Concerns of the quality of education as it relates to unemployment has become an issue in Africa economies. and according to a UNESCO report, “while employers complain that graduates are poorly prepared for the workplace, the students on the other hand, point to their teachers as the defective link in the teaching-learning continuum.”
This is because most teacher in Africa lack the skills to effectively impart knowledge.
Bali’s approach to teaching and learning is to “cultivate the human being”, one who is fully formed to impact society in a positive manner.
“I think education or my role as a teacher is not to teach them the content or to teach them the skills. I mean, yes, that too. But for me, it’s how do you help shape them as a human being, as a citizen? How do you shape their morality? And how do they shape the way they are in the world? The way they be, not what they do and what they say, but how they are. And so that’s been central to my practice for a long time. And it requires making yourself very vulnerable all the time and reflecting a lot and questioning yourself about what you’re doing. As you grow with your students and learn with them and learn from them.” She says.
Her journey towards open began when she discovered open spaces such as Facebook and Twitter very useful in her education and career journey in terms finding information at a time Egypt’s political unrest was at its peak and she couldn’t go out to use the library nor find all what she needed on the online library.
It was around this time she fell in love with piracy and open access. She deeply was in awe of all the information she could find and the willingness of other to share their work or point her in the direction of resources she needed.
‘I realised that some people put stuff open access that gave me what I needed. And I fell in love with open access and openness and piracy, honestly, because piracy can be socially just if knowledge is being prevented from reaching us, because we’re in this kind of country where we don’t have access.’
Her love for connecting and interacting with people also led to co-founding virtually Connecting a grassroots movement that challenges academic gatekeeping at conferences. When travelling became difficult as a result of having a child, Bali wanted to get the most out of the virtual conferences she attended.
” I wanted to talk to people. I didn’t want to attend the conference sessions, I could do that. That’s not a problem. But it’s the chatting that you do when you’re over coffee or in the hallway, that’s what I was missing. And I had so many of my friends, the friendships I’ve been cultivating online for two or three years, I wanted to meet these people and spend time with them.”
This is how she and her co-founder Rebecca Hogue started virtually connecting which has now moved from just being about access to “disrupting, and challenging, and justice.”
“It [Virtually Connecting] started as giving access to conferences for virtual folks,” she says. “But it actually became challenging academic gatekeeping that was preventing voices of global south, and women, and early career people, and PhD students, who didn’t have access to funds, and single parents who couldn’t travel, people with disabilities, or health issues that may travelling difficult. They now had a voice in the conferences, in the conversations.”
Bali’s work is deeply rooted in openness and though she admits the concept of open may not be for everybody, she encourages as many that can to embrace it.
So I think openness can give, if you’re willing to give it. I think a lot of people may benefit from other people’s openness without ever doing anything first. And that’s okay, because a lot of open stuff is there for anyone to use without reciprocity. But if you reciprocate, and if you maintain relationships, and you invest in building them, you’re going to get so much more out of it, because people will find you and get you things you didn’t even know you needed.” She says.
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