Troubled spaces: negotiating school–community boundaries in northern Nigeria

ABSTRACT

Community participation is a vital component of the educational decentralisation policies that are now widespread in Nigeria. In this paper, we explore school–community relations in different localities in northern Nigeria, where there is both very little inter-generational experience of schooling and minimal engagement by local communities in social and political management processes. Drawing on ethnographic data in and around six primary schools in Adamawa State, northern Nigeria, we problematise school–community relations and highlight the complexities and tensions in their social interactions. This we do by focusing on the school boundary that both connects and distinguishes it from the surrounding community. In particular, we explore the agonistic spatial and temporal regulation that operates at the school boundary, with specific attention to the different ways that students, teachers and the community comply or resist such strategies of governmentality. In concluding, we argue that it is imperative to think through the implications for/of international education and development policies as they are launched in diverse localities. This would help to avoid accounts of local deficit that are so readily invoked when top-down policies reach communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Community participation
• decentralisation
• space
• temporality
• school boundaries
• Nigeria
• sub-Saharan Africa

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Being categorised as literate in this case only requires recognition of one or more simple words on flashcards in English, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba or Arabic.

2. 65.5%, with literacy measured as the ability to read part or all of a sentence in one of the Nigeria’s three main languages: Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba.

3. Primary NAR in Adamawa rose from 58% in 2010 to 79% in 2015.

4. All school names have been changed.

5. For a review of the literature on the various challenges and limited successes of SBMCs in Nigeria, see [name removed for review, 204–211].

6. The most recent Nigeria Education Data Survey (NPC and RTI International 2016), for example, indicates that nationally, and in the North East, a far higher percentage of Muslim children attend state schools or combine both state and religious schooling than attend Qu’ranic schools alone.

7. Young boys who often came from other states to study Islam with a local mallam.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Máiréad Dunne

Máiréad Dunne is a Professor of the Sociology of Education and former Director of the Centre for International Education at the University of Sussex. Her research has attended to social inequalities and educational stratification especially in the Global South.  She has worked alongside teams of local researchers and practitioners in contextually located, multi-dimensional explorations of policy, institutions and practices. These studies have realised several highly rated research projects, research reports and academic publications.

Sara Humphreys

Dr Sara Humphreys is a freelance researcher and Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for International Education, University of Sussex. She has lived and worked in education in  Africa, South America, Europe and is currently based in the Caribbean. Her research interests include issues surrounding gender, identity and social inequalities and the micro-processes of schooling, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Salihu Bakari

Dr Salihu Bakari is Director of the Research and Development Department, Tertiary Education Trust Fund, Nigeria and he has worked as a lecturer, researcher and senior administrator in education in Nigeria. This includes positions in teacher education and as Director of Adamawa State Universal Basic Education Board in north- eastern Nigeria. His research has focused on issues of gender, sexual abuse, identity, educational access and social stratification with particular reference to Northern Nigeria.