out of the box

The last two weeks were hard work. When I came back from my meetings in Ilorin I had to finalise the preparations for my 3 day workshop. I had to organize the 3 day workshop for my National Volunteers and desk officers from the four states I work in. I is always nice to have this annual meeting with my volunteers. They are young and enthousiastic about their teaching; Eager to learn and bright. So preparing this workshop was a lot of work but with the idea in the back of my mind that it would be appreciated enough no matter what. In the preparation I have had help from Vonny and Lucy, the two other vso teacher trainers in Nigeria at the moment. Lucy gave me some ideas about the content, which she already had used before and Vonny came up with loads of games I could use to activate the participants. With all this in my mind I started preparing 4 weeks ago, first planning and budgeting, then working on content. It is a lot of work, especially when there are not too many people you can share your ideas with, as Lucy and Vonny had their own temporary assignments. 

In the end everything worked out, I named my workshop ‘out of the box’ as the aim of the three days was to get the participants to look at teaching as a creative process. So I tried to get them busy with things that were new or unusual for them. The first day started with an artist, Stanley, he had an session on creative writing and using paint to make teaching materials. He did get the youngsters enthousiastic about their work. It was really nice to see everybody concentrating on their circles and letters and drawing. This activity was unusual as even in schools children are not stimulated to be creative, most schools do offer art classes but are more about theory. There are hardly any activities during those lessons which foster creativeness. The artist came back the second day to allow the participants to finish their work. The results were surprising, there was quite a different in performance, but everybody was proud and that was nice to see.

 







In between the sessions delivered by Stanley, Vonny and I organized 5 sessions about teaching and the use of teaching aids and games during the lessons. The first session was about early childhood learning. Questions like what did you learn before you went to school? How did you learn it? From whom? And Why? It was a nice exercise to go back to the childhood, to the basics of learning. With that we started letting them do simple games like ‘Finding your Friend’. In the end of the first day all participants did have a well prepared game and group work ready for their own lessons. As home work they had to prepare a full lesson plan with a group work activity and proper lesson objectives.

The second day we started with a recap activity ‘inner outer circle’ to recollect some information from the sessions of yesterday. Inner outer circle is about asking questions and giving answers. It was a nice energizer for the morning. After that we had a session about child centered lesson objectives, how to write SMART objectives before every lesson and the importance of lesson prep if you want to do group work and other activities. The younsters had to check if their own lesson objectives were SMART enough. After that I invited one national volunteer to deliver his lesson for the group, to see if he had understood the homework and if the others could see the good and bad things in his preparation. It turned out to be a good lesson of which we can be proud of, especially if this is the result after one day of the workshop. After lunch Vonny had a session about self-esteem. The major question in this session was ‘how can a teacher influence the self-esteem of a pupil?’ For the answer to this question she let all participants think back to their own personal stories. When were you in a situation that the teacher misused the power he/she had over you? To our surprise some people came forward to tell their personal story, of which Fatima’s is still tuch in my head as her story sounded much like my own encounter with mr Van de Veen when I left primary education.

The third day I did not have to do much, I had invited two facilitators from Bauchi, they work for Father Leo’s NGO, Sharing Education and Learning for Life. This whole day was about personal leadership in the classroom. A nice day of reflection and self-development. 

All and all I think the workshop went well till that point that we had done the evaluation and were giving out the money for travel allowance. Because as always the allowance was to small and there was a need to discuss this en plain public with my guests in the room. Like I didn’t know the allowances are too small, like I don’t know that Nigerians always seem to think you have to get paid to come to a workshop instead of paying to be allowed to enter (like in our own culture). A workshop like I had organized for those three days, they should at least pay 350 euro a person as we provided them with accommodation, food and drinks (water and tea) for four nights in a hotel.

But now after a few days my disappointment is gone and I look back on a good workshop. I want to thank Vonny and Lucy for helping me prepare and Stanley, Jonathan and Moses for their sessions and all participants for their active participation.  

Back again

Finally an update about my work again. This time it didn’t take me long to write because I didn’t have any work but because I had too much work. I have never been as busy as I am right now during my whole stay in Nigeria. Now I am the national coordinator of the NGVP I first of all have to travel quite often and second of all I meet interesting people. ‘High up people’ as we would say in The Netherlands.

For example in December I had the honor to meet the new Commissioner of Nassarawa State while I was hospitalized. And I have regular phone calls with the executive director of the Science and Technical School Board. I have to see if I can arrange meetings with them and invite them for workshops I have to organize. Wow ….. who would have ever thought that I would be capable of managing stuff like this.

Just last week I went for an advocacy visit back to Ilorin, I had arranged 3 meetings to promote and re-sell the NGVP to the Ministry of Education and Human Capital Development, the Ministry of Sports and Youth development and CSACEFA (an umbrella organization for all NGO’s and CSO’s working for education). All meetings went well after some rescheduling.

Short list of outcome:

·         Federal Minister of Youth Development is the former Commissioner of Education in Kwara so I should try to get the Federal Ministry involved in the programme so they can strengthen the connection with NYSC HQ and on State level.

·         I have to send an official letter to CSACEFA with a summary of what we discussed about what they can do for NGVP and what we offer in the NGVP programme.

·         CSACEFA will do strong advocacy for the NGVP in the Ministry of Education and use their connections to work together to get a fair selection and recruitment system.

·         CSACEFA appointed Public Relation Officer Adejo as the contact person for NGVP in Kwara and they offer to support Matthew to do the monitoring (and might offer him a job to be support officer in Kwara)

·         CSACEFA will also help pushing the Ministry of Youth and Ministry of Education to arrange employment for NGVP volunteers.

·         Olusoji Sogunno (CSACEFA Kwara coordinator) said he might pop by in the workshop in Abuja if he is around to see some volunteers and talk to them.

During this visit I also met someone, I think from Osun State, who really was interested in the NGVP. He said it would be the perfect opportunity for the State to fight the unemployment and poor education. I agreed with him but also had to say that our country strategy doesn’t allow us to work with partners in Osun. A pity isn’t it. A State that might be very interested and supportive of what we do cannot get our help. But then again we cannot work in all States.

Then today I met the executive director of an big NGO in Abuja who already started a community teachers project in the FCT. Very interesting. I hope to get a better meeting soon to see if we can support eachother. I really believe in this project and I hope I will be able to leave a legacy behind when I leave this country in June. A good project with proper out lines and good frameworks for which (inter)national volunteers will be working with pride.

Proud

After all those stories of ritual killings in Ilorin I was not so keen on going there,  but now I am back I am so glad I visited that place.

It is a nice quiet, big city. It is even clean if you compare it to Lafia. People are friendly and seem to be hard working. It was so different from what I know from my side of Nigeria.

I did go to Ilorin to get a clear view on the National Graduate Volunteering Program, the program I am working for as a teacher trainer and now also as a national coordinator. Through this program we want to encourage young Nigerians to help developing their country through education and community work. Right now we work with 7 NGV’s in Nassarawa, 9 in Kwara, 11 in Kano and 2 in the Demonstration School for Deaf Children in Kaduna. In each state there was supposed to be an international volunteer working as a teacher trainer, but only Lea and I were there. Now Lea has left Nigeria I am the only one working in all states. It is a busy future for me but that’s better than doing not much.

My visit to Kwara was to see if and how I can get new life into the program there. The former government neglected it and NYSC and VSO didn’t pull any strings to get it moving. So now I am the one trying and to be honest I am hopeful. The commissioner of the Ministry of Education made some promises that were really promising. Also CSACEFA was positive about their support for this program. It were nice first meetings with these parties.

On the last day I had organized, with great help from Matthew and Micheal, a meeting with the NGV’s in Kwara. They all came down for this meeting and they were so full of energy!

During the meeting we did a SWOT-analyses. Interesting statements came out of that. Very useful for further exploration. Some things like: using old national volunteers to monitor the new volunteers or during the send forth event in the end there should be a major item about CV writing and job hunting. Maybe even invite possible employers so the volunteers can present themselves.

Also a more urgent and more important item came up; there should be a solid framework around the NGVP in every state, a good job description for volunteers and a good memorandum of understanding for all partners in each state. All roles and responsibilities should be clear and monitored. It would be nice if the monitoring and evaluation would be imbedded in this all.

Very helpful and promising as I may say. Thank you guys! 

11 new faces

Last Friday I came back from a very successful visit to Kano. The purpose of this visit was to get the Science and technical school board (STSB) in Kano familiar with doing assessments and to assess 10 new National Graduate volunteers. After this I was supposed to introduce the selected volunteers to proper teaching.

So on Tuesday, Chinwe and I, left for Kano by private car. We were about to leave around 9 so we could do some preparation when we arrived in Kano, as Chinwe was on leave just before this trip. In the end we didn’t leave Abuja before 11 am, even more close to noon. The ride in the private car was easy going and we took our time as Chinwe ordered the driver not to go faster than 110 km/h. He seemed to have little problems with that, because whenever Chinwe was asleep we hit the 140 occasionally. After a short lunch stop in Kaduna we arrived in Kano around 6 pm. The first hotel Chinwe had in mind to stay was fully booked so we had to find another one, which was quite a challenge as the room rates were quite high and in all hotels the cheapest rooms seemed to be occupied. At Tahir luxury suites I tried to get a big discount by telling them we work for an NGO, and it almost worked. We almost got the NGO rates, but the manager didn’t seem to know VSO and wasn’t that interested in finding out about it. In the end we ended up in Green Palace hotel, a nice hotel in the same league as Crystal Palace in Abuja. The thing that is better in Green Palace is the food! I had pizza at the first evening! And for breakfast I could choose from tomato and cheese sandwiches to white oats or full English. Really nice, although we had to wait quite long for this good food.

The first day of the assessment started with a big surprise. The STSB didn’t short list 20 candidates but 34 and most of them just did show up because somebody told them about this. Showed up without first applying! Mmmm, what to do?  We had to bring the number down to at least 22 as we didn’t bring too many materials. So we decided to first test them all for their English skills. We let them write the essay first to preselect the teachers whose English is good enough. While they were writing the essays I could inform the STSB about how to do assessments and why we do assessments.

In the end all went well and we selected 11 new volunteers for the NGVP in Kano. The happy volunteers will have to start teaching on Monday. So before that they will have to get confident about their teaching skills. Quite a challenge if I may say so. To help them a little, I let them think about good learning and good teaching during a one day workshop about this. It went well, although the dynamics in this group were totally different than the group I taught in August. Is it culture? Most likely as in this group all except for one were Muslim and 6 are female.

preparing a new placement

Sometime you are wondering as a volunteer ‘what is my job about?’, ‘What did i come here to do?’ If you look at my first placement description you would think it is all plain and clear. I am here as a teacher trainer to teach national volunteers how to teach. There is not much you can discuss about this job description if your read it like that. Just visit the volunteers, prepare workshops and try to make teachers out of them. But …. Now after one year of trying it seems like things are not working the way it should. My program officer in Nigeria recognized the problems I mentioned and has some other difficulties with the program. So we decided to change my placement. Starting the New Year I will be starting a new placement as national coordinator for the National Graduate Volunteering Program (NGVP). This means I will be responsible for the current national volunteers working in the educational sector and I have to make sure that the program will be in hands of partners within a period of 6 months. This is quite a challenge, but I am not afraid of challenges as long as I experience support.

As I said officially I will start in January, but this morning I am already getting ready to leave for Kano. As we have a ‘new’ partner there who is willing to carry a part of the NGVP. We are now of to provide them with knowledge about assessment and we will help them assess their first national volunteers for this program. I also will provide the selected volunteers with a first workshop about teaching and learning. So in a way I already start my new placement this week.

How I will approach this new placement is still a blur. I hope I will soon get a chance to talk to the current partners and stakeholders. I also need to figure out how to build a proper network and where the educationists meet. Luckely I already met with the secretary of the Nigeria commission of education (NCE) at the annual JJCE meeting that was held in Lafia a week ago. Maybe that will be a start of my federal network.