TAMAM Project Initiation

The TAMAM Project was initiated by Dr. Murad Jurdak, Dr. Saouma BouJaoude, and Dr. Sally Al-Turki in 2007. It stemmed from their concern about the nature and quality of professional development programs and the processes of research and knowledge production in the Arab World. They saw that professional development should be connected to the problems of practice and should occur concurrently while practitioners are doing their work in their schools. In other words, professional development should happen alongside their practice. Project initiators also wanted to move away from theoretical position papers to promote empirical research in the Arab World. They believe that recommendations that feed into policymaking processes needed to be based on empirical research.