Challenges

Everybody that got to know me a little bit better, know that I won’t bounce back on a challenge that easy. Why would I be here? A challenge makes me fight and work hard to make it work, even when others don’t see it happen anymore. This is the case with my job here in Nigeria. Since October 2010 I’m here to fulfil a job as teacher trainer for National volunteers who are not trained to be teachers. On itself already a challenge as I think being a teacher is not just something you do, you really need to learn how to coop with situations and how to transfer knowledge in an effective way.

I was not the only one entering this country with this particular placement description, a volunteer from the UK, has had the same challenges since October in Kwara State. He did not see the bright light at the end of the tunnel like I see it. He saw the same chaos…… working without a real plan ….. inventing a wheel without resources. Maybe he was the smart one. I sometimes think; ‘Maybe I also should think about changing my placement in something less stressful and more structured.’ He left the placement partly and is now working in a more lined out placement in Kwara.

I stayed because I believed and I still belief in the power of this project. I stayed to fight for the national volunteers I work for. I wanted to see how I can make this work in Nassarawa State. But ever since I started fighting for this project the light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t get brighter of bigger. It stays far away out of reach. How long can I keep working in this situation without getting stressed out by frustrations?

I’ve been shouting and crying for a stakeholders meeting about this whole programme. I’ve threatened to leave the country if the stakeholder meeting wasn’t arranged before March. Somehow I didn’t leave and I agreed on a meeting after my trip to The Netherlands, so date was set in June, last Tuesday to be exact. Finally my meeting about goals and objectives, I thought. All stakeholders in Nassarawa state were invited; also some potential new stakeholders were there.

The evening before the meeting Yakiem, Chinwe, Lucy and I met to do the last preparations for the meeting. Then I discovered that the content of the meeting as planned was not as promising as I hoped it would be. It was more about brainstorming instead of making plans. Then we had to prepare our own parts and I had to prepare the bit about objectives and I knew I had to do that bit, but in my head I did a different kind of session about objectives. In my head I planned a SWOT-analyses and after that try to generate new objectives with the outcome. Now I had only 20 minutes! That’s no time to write new objectives with a group of 20 participants! So I organized in inventory session about new possible objectives.

So during the meeting with all important stakeholders present we were only brainstorming about the future of the programme. No real decisions were made. The only real decision I forced was that I will be the project manager for the NGVP in Nassarawa state. The rest of the outcome is more or less caught by the words; We could do. …… We should do……. Maybe………. Possibly……. For me for now empty words. So I will start shouting again for a follow up in which really agreements are signed with a real placement agreement in the end of it. Best thing about that meeting will be that I’m the one able to initiate it as the project manager.

Nigerian children are different .......

Last week in Azara I prepared a whole day workshop about classroom management and teaching aids. During the preparations for this workshop it became even clearer to me that there are a lot of cultural influences in how we look at children and their capabilities. I also noticed some of the mistakes I made during my first workshop here in Nigeria in December 2010; I was thinking too much out of my own perspective of what is good teaching and effective learning. During my 7 month here in Nigeria I now learned to look through a Nigeria perspective with my own vision on education. So I can combine my own thoughts with the current situation here. 

I could really notice a difference in interaction between me and the group of teachers that I was trying to reach. I could talk out of my own experiences and from what I have seen during my school visits in the past months. Some of the big differences in my own perspective on teaching and learning and how to react to a adolescent are; 

1. In The Netherlands I would encourage the adolescent to make their own decisions, and let them meet their own mistakes and reflect on that. Here teachers are not yet used to talk to an adolescent like they can make decisions, so they did not learn to coop with the possibility of making decisions.  
2. During the workshop in Azara we were talking about classroom rules and consequences (at least that’s how I introduced the session). Everybody had to list his/her classroom rules and make a list of top 6 consequences. Consequences are called punishment here in Nigeria. Some examples of punishments that are used by teachers in Azara: standing up in the classroom for about 5 minutes, kneeling down in the classroom, turning your face from the board for the rest of the lesson, send out of the classroom, kneeling down outside for 20 minutes, do frog jumping on school premises.  
3.  In The Netherlands we are more and more about involving pupils into the lesson and letting them find out what they need to learn before they can make the next step. Here in Nigeria all the lessons are like lectures without books. All a pupil does is listening. Most of the time the pupils are not allowed to write during the lectures because that will distract him/her. Some other moment in the week the pupils will have to write the notes in their notebooks. The teacher is writing everything on the blackboard without explaining anything because he/she already did that in a previous lesson or will do in a following lesson. During the workshop we had a discussion about evolving skills in the classroom; When do pupils have to learn skills they need to be successful in tertiary education? What are skills they need? Listening and writing at the same time is one of those skills you need to train in the classroom. You can’t just expect them to be there after secondary school. It is the teachers/schools responsibility to know which skills and to teach those skills which pupils need before going to tertiary school. 
4. In The Netherlands child-centered teaching is important and for that classroom shouldn’t be too crowded. A Dutch teacher will start to complain when there are more than 27 pupils in his/her classroom. In some schools maybe already when there are 25 pupils packing your classroom.  Here I introduced activated teaching because classrooms are more often packed with 70 pupils, with which it would be too big a challenge to do real child-centered learning. Activating teaching is about little things you can do to get the pupils more involved during the lessons. Little bit on how to ask real questions to a classroom and how to force pupils to think about an answer. 
5. During teacher training college in The Netherlands you learn a lot about child psychology and sociology and other things you need to understand if you work with other people. I think it is important for a teacher to know with whom he/she has to deal with. But it is maybe more important to recognize the individual pupils in your classroom. I know that I wasn’t the best in learning names by heart, but I always knew particular thing about my pupils, Hobby’s, relations, relatives, anything. During the workshop, but also during other school visits I noticed that a lot of the teachers don’t really know what is going on in the lives of the pupils. It like they don’t seem to care. Everybody needs to act the same and if you act differently teachers don’t know what to do and you will have the change to be hit with a thin branch or ruler. It’s is really sad to see that some adolescents just are exploring (something they need to do) and then been hit with a branch or ruler. Even though corporal punishment is forbidden in Nassarawa State.When I did talk about this with teachers during the workshop they really didn’t know how to act differently. When I told them that in The Netherlands children aren’t saints and they will try everything they can to dodge school or to do anything against the rules, they look at me with big eyes: ‘How do you correct them if you aren’t allowed to touch them?’ ‘You will have to talk some sense into them, talk about decent behaviour and why there are rules. Then let them do some work as a consequence for his/her actions.’ That was something that was impossible with an African child, they all said. 'Our children are different, they don't listen if you don't teach them the hard way.' I was so surprised by that answer. I said: ‘They are not used to it yet because at home they are also beaten when they aren’t acting as they should do according to their parents, but somebody has to start making a change!’ Luckely lot of them agreed on that.