Dala Taji Farouki
Ms. Farouki is a Higher Education Strategy & Management specialist focusing on the Middle East region, particularly on foreign branch campuses and transnational education. She has dedicated her career and research to comtributing to all aspects of tertiary education management, from the homegrown institution to the federal government. Her expertise draws upon extensive study of global best practices from countries such as Japan and Cuba.
With more than twelve years of experience as an education professional, Ms. Farouki has worked in several education stakeholders in the US and the UAE such as the World Bank, The Dubai Government's Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA), the American University in Dubai, and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). She is currently a PhD. Candidate at the University of Exeter, with her dissertation being, “Character education’s existence in the United Arab Emirates’ foreign branch campuses.” She is also a senior specialist in Human Development at the General Secretariat of the Executive Council of Abu Dhabi.
Through her experience, she has created government education strategies, managed external relations of a government authority through reviewing, recommending, and creating partnerships with leading federal and local government stakeholders, conducted international educator workshops, and advised government and private organizations on education strategy and management. She is a specialist in national identity and character education for the Gulf region.
A Fulbright scholar who spent her research year in the UAE studying the transnational education systems in the country, she is the author of a UAE higher education- focused chapter in a book focused on international student services, as well as a chapter focusing on the Arab World’s higher education’s offering in media for the inaugural UAE Arab Media Forum publication. Ms. Farouki currently lives in Abu Dhabi.
For her PhD, Ms. Farouki has chosen to focus on Character education within Foreign branch campuses in the United Arab Emirates. The dissertation will focus on how character education can be defined by its stakeholders for implementation as an initiative in a foreign branch campus in Dubai. Stakeholders including faculty, students and education decision makers in the institutions and the government will be surveyed and/or interviewed in a two part mixed methods study. Currently, there is no established definition of character education, let alone one customised for the needs of the UAE's unique socio-political and economic context.
