In July 2023, I traveled to Northeast Nigeria to complete data collection for my Integrative Project (IP). From July 20-30, I conducted 30 interviews with nomads living in and around Yola, the capital of Adamawa State, focused on nomadic communities’ approaches to maintaining education continuity in times of migration and crisis. I was able to conduct this research with the support of the CAE Travel Grant and because of my role with the International Rescue Committee (IRC). I used the travel grant to fund travel, lodging, and translation costs for conducting interviews. I had spent the previous week in Abuja - the capital of Nigeria - in my capacity as the Senior Research Programme Coordinator for Education Research in Conflict and Protracted Crisis, an IRC-led consortium focused on producing evidence on the most effective approaches to improving access, quality and continuity of education for children living in conflict and crisis environment funded by the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). Being in-country and affiliated with the IRC made it both logistically and financially feasible for me to extend my trip by two weeks to conduct research, while also working with ERICC’s research teams in Nigeria.
My research also would not have been possible without the support of two of my colleagues in the ERICC consortium, Dr. Ola Akogun - ERICC’s Regional Research Director for Nigeria and South Sudan - and Dr. Sani Njobdi - Principal Investigator for Common Heritage Foundation’s Policy & Systems Study in Nigeria as part of the ERICC consortium. Ola and Sani were and continue to be invaluable guides and mentors for me throughout my project, first helping me develop and strengthen my research questions and then introducing me to the team of translators with whom I worked, as well as an “Ardo” (Fulani community chief) who joined the research team to connect me to participants. My advisor and then Director of CAE, Dr. Garnett Russell, and Dr. Mary Mendenhall provided me with feedback on my study protocol and plans, as well as valuable advice throughout the project.
Through this project, I wanted to understand how nomadic communities living in crisis contexts plan and carry out education during periods of migration to explore lessons that could potentially be applied to designing more effective educational programming for learners who have become mobile because they have been displaced by conflict or other shocks. The idea to speak to nomads about how they educate and migrate was inspired by the indigenous knowledge systems research methodologies developed by Elizabeth Sumida Huaman, Nathan Martin, and Zeremariam Fre, which seek to center nomads as experts in issues of mobility.
I explored three research questions through this study:
- How do nomadic communities in NE Nigeria teach and learn in ways that allow them to continue learning before, during, and after planned and unplanned movements?
- What are the guiding principles or practices of these communities’ mobile teaching and learning practices?
- How do nomadic education practices adapt to situations of conflict and/or crisis, when movement patterns are unpredictable and reactive rather than planned?
To answer these questions, I interviewed 30 Fulani nomads (15 men and 15 women) living in and around Yola. Many nomads in Nigeria have started to settle down and sedentarize for various reasons, so to target issues of mobility, I tried to ensure that the majority of participants came from families and communities who continue to move. The Fulani are one of the largest ethnic groups in Nigeria, making up around 6% of the total population as of 2018, and they are the largest group of nomads in the country. They are especially prominent in the Northeast - the headquarters of the national foundation for Fulani herders is located in Yola. Through my connections to Drs. Akogun and Njobdi, as well as the Ardo who joined my team, were able to secure an invitation from the foundation - The Tabital Pulaaku Njonde Jam Foundation - to conduct interviews at their headquarters. These interviews began with questions about the meaning of education to participants and a discussion about the types of non-formal education that are important for young Fulanis to learn for them to develop into valued community members. From there, we spoke about teaching and learning planning and practices and how these practices changed in response to migrations and crises. All interviews were conducted in Fulfulde with English translation.
Throughout the interviews, participants shared insights into the types of life skills their communities value, including herding skills and the ecological understandings required to rear livestock, home-building, navigation and planning, as well as social and religious skills. We also spoke about the roles of different family and community members in teaching and preparing young learners to be productive members of society. These conversations demonstrated the importance of religious and mystic leaders, as well as the prominent role teenagers and young adults take on as mentors, guides, tutors, and eventually teachers within their communities. One especially interesting aspect of tutor and mentorship that I learned was that teenagers and young adults who took on these mentorship roles within their communities were often put forward to become teachers in formal schools when government programs would build schools and/or look for teachers in the area. So not only did their mentorship prepare the next generation, it also opened up pathways to more consistent accreditation, employment and pay.
Participants also told me about a form of project-based learning and assessment for children on the cusp of being able to rear livestock independently. In many of the communities, young teenage boys who have worked with and observed their older siblings and parents for a long enough time are asked to scout a migration route for the family’s cattle that includes fertile grazing ground, water sources, shelter and safety. While they undertake this either alone or in small groups, older members of the community follow close by (but out of sight) to assess their decision-making and intervene if necessary for safety. While not directly related to formal education or foundational learning, I found this to be a very interesting example of empowering youth to take their learning into their own hands and to demonstrate important competencies in an applied manner.
I will now need to analyze these and the many other examples and stories I was told to better understand the principles and practices that underpin these activities and to see if and how they might teach us about learning for individuals and communities who are on the move. I don’t expect to make direct links between the route-scouting activity and similar activities for displaced students. Rather, I will explore how these kinds of activities are identified and chosen, how they demonstrate competencies that are important to learners and their communities, and how they are planned to be flexible and context-driven.
I’ve recently finished transcribing all 30 interviews and have just started writing my final IP paper. In the meantime, I came away from this project with two key lessons on the research process itself:
Prior relationships and social incentives were indispensable to the work. Nomadic communities are considered hard to reach, and I did experience some hesitance from participants to come into Yola for interviews. It takes a long time to get into town and effectively takes away a full work day from participants. Both Sani and Ola have worked with the same communities on veterinary medicine for decades. Since they placed a lot of trust in me and vouched for me, the Ardo we worked with felt the same and went out of his way to ask participants to come into town for the interviews. Furthermore, we reached out to the head of the foundation office in Yola to seek permission to conduct our interviews there, and we were actually met by the leader of the Fulani in Nigeria who welcomed me and the project. When participants heard that we would conduct interviews at the foundation office and that leadership would be there during interview times, they used the opportunity to petition their foundation leadership for different needs, and so were able to use their time in Yola productively in addition to participating in the project. These incentives were especially important when we had to adjust our approach after the first few interviews. After the first two days, we realized that most participants were brought in by the foundation itself, most participants were no longer nomadic, and all were men who spoke about male children. It was a bit complicated to ask foundation leaders to not invite more people from their communities in Yola and to clarify that we wanted to speak to people who were still nomadic, and an equal number of male and women participants. These conversations ended up being positive and productive as a result of the relationships and trust that had already been established, and I don’t think I would have been able to make these requests without that trust.
Less can be more, and don’t be afraid to modify your approach. I went into this project with a lot of questions and wished I could have asked them all during the week I was in Yola. Both Dr. Garnett Russell and Dr. Mendenhall advised me to cut down my protocol questions before I left, and I did, but I could have and probably should have cut even more. Especially since my research started with definitions of education and non-formal learning experiences, there was a lot of work to be done to understand participants’ perceptions of non-school education, its importance, scope, practices, outcomes, etc, that took up a lot more interview time than I expected. As I interviewed more people, I became more comfortable selecting which questions I would dig deeper into and which didn’t require as much time. I often found that after asking a couple of initial questions, I would have a good feel for the person whom I was talking to and what they were interested in talking about. I found that spending time on those subjects was much more valuable than trying to give equal airtime to all questions. I made sure we addressed all areas of inquiry in each interview, but I started to learn how to follow participants’ interest in specific topics, and ultimately came out of it with detailed information on all of my questions from different participants.
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