David L. Wheeler

Immersive technologies, such as virtual reality, have promised to allow users to explore everything from atoms to archaeological sites without ever having to leave a headset. I spoke to leaders in the field and wrote about how the educational use of these technologies is maturing (PDF).

I offer some solutions to a problem that many writers, students, and professors complain about. I’ve always believed that writers’ block is the result of improper research—often too much or too little—and poor planning, rather than actually being an obstacle during writing itself.

In the summer of 2019, the political situation in Sudan looked hopeful. Street protests, led largely by young people, had toppled the regime of the long-time dictator, Omar al-Bashir. But women, who had felt free to escape social restrictions, return to the streets and join the protests, were excluded from a transitional council that was supposed to rule the country.

Cambodia was one of the first countries where I did international reporting. In visits to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Documentation Center of Cambodia, I got a chilling look at the details of how political prisoners had been tortured to death.

I led an editorial team that surveyed 702 Arab higher education institutions and found that women led fewer than 7 percent of them. Nine Arab countries had no female academic leaders at all. This was the first time that the weak position of women in Arab academic leadership has been documented.

With my colleagues at Al-Fanar Media, I conceived and edited five articles that drew a portrait of the difficult work environment that Arab researchers face. Ninety-one percent of researchers surveyed wanted to leave the country they were working in. The editorial package drew coverage in a wide variety of publications, including Science, Times Higher Education, Morocco World News, and SciDev (in Arabic).

A longstanding theme of my editing career has been to carefully monitor how education is affected by broad social and economic trends. In this article I edited, my colleagues and I examined how the drive to use online education in the Middle East during the Covid-19 pandemic weakened access to education for girls, refugees, and students from low-income families.

Two articles I edited about students pursuing advanced degrees inside Syria created a detailed perspective of those who are trying to rise to the highest levels of academic achievement, in a nation coping with the effects of civil war. Despite facing enormous obstacles, Syrian students expressed a yearning to help their country through research, teaching, and community service.

A project that I led trained 58 Arab reporters to write about education. The project was supported by one of a handful of grants awarded by the UN Democracy Fund from an applicant pool of more than a thousand applicants. Many of the journalists who attended the workshops still write about education today.

Four conferences that I and my colleagues from Al-Fanar Media organized in Istanbul, Amman, and New York from 2015 to 2016 focused the conversation about refugee education during the height of the Syrian conflict. The meetings also helped connect international donors with local expertise, local universities, and nongovernmental organizations working with refugees.

I won six years of support for journalism that spotlighted the work of Arab researchers, who often face difficult conditions and have little institutional support. Al-Fanar Media covered both researchers’ discoveries and the obstacles they need to overcome.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the Arab region had long resisted online education in any form. I led the editorial team at Al-Fanar Media to produce in-depth coverage that revealed how the pandemic hurt the education of the most vulnerable youth, including the poor, those in conflict zones, and girls in socially conservative families.