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Becoming a teacher: Experiences of female trainees in initial teacher education in Nigeria

2019; Elsevier BV; Volume: 87; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.tate.2019.102957

1879-2480

Sara Humphreys, Máiréad Dunne, Naureen Durrani, Swadchet Sankey, Jiddere Kaibo,

Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare

This article foregrounds the experiences of female trainees on a scholarship programme for pre-service teacher education aimed at increasing the number of qualified female teachers from rural northern Nigeria, and boosting female pupil enrolments.Challenging conditions in colleges of education, including curricular shortcomings, overcrowding, limited resources and inadequate learning support were compounded by non-academic factors -especially financial, and gendered constraints.Collectively, they threatened student retention, learning and attainment, and the programme's gender equity goals.Findings highlight the need to move beyond increasing numbers of female studentteachers, to improving quality in teacher education, paying attention to out-of-college conditions too.The worldwide expansion of formal education in the Global South, driven by the Education For All (EFA), Millennium Development Goal (MDG) and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agendas, has created an increased demand for qualified teachers.This is particularly the case in Nigeria, in West Africa, which is the continent's most populous country -estimated at over 180 million people (National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), 2016) -and is said to have the largest number of primary-school-age children out of school worldwide (www.uis.unesco.org).After the return to democratic civilian rule in 1999, following 16 years of military dictatorshipsduring which spending on education was a low priority -Nigeria became one of the world's fastest growing economies, primarily on the back of its oil and gas revenues.This, however, has done little to alleviate widespread poverty (Litwack et al. 2013), stall escalating unemployment, or address social inequalities that exist between urban and rural areas, and southern and northern states (World Bank, 2017).Attendance rates at primary school in the North West and North East zones are about half of those for southern regions, and are lower in rural areas and for girls (National Population Commission (NPC) and RTI International, 2016).In addition, in the North East, communities and schools have been severely affected by the ongoing violence related to Boko Haram.Politically, Nigeria is divided into 36 states (plus the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja), clustered into six geo-political zones, which are further sub-divided into Local Government Areas (LGAs).This arrangement, it has been argued, is a way to 'manage ethnic diversity', with estimates on the country's ethnic groups ranging from 150 to 500 (Osaghae and Suberu, 2005).Out of the 500 plus languages and dialects identified in Nigeria (www.ethnologue.com),the three main languages, Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo, reflect the most numerous ethnic groups: Hausa-Fulani