Beyond “traditional geographies”: Integrating urban political ecology and cultural sustainability into undergraduate geographical education in Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This study utilized qualitative methods and the urban political ecology (UPE) framework to situate changes in scope and content of undergraduate geography curriculum in Nigeria within the domain of education for sustainability. It was stimulated by significant curriculum-related events in the geography department of the University of Nigeria, and strategic policy developments in research governance in the university. Having cultural sustainability as its overarching concern, the reform initiative focused on solid waste management (SWM), a challenge with roots in cultural activity. While engaging with students and linking cultural sustainability with SWM, it is argued that integrating SWM topics into new and existing geography courses represents new possibilities for urban sustainable development and geographical education in Nigeria.

KEYWORDS:

• cultural sustainability
• curriculum reform
• geographical education
• solid waste management, sustainable development
• urban political ecology

Acknowledgment

The research reported in this article was originally presented at the 57th Annual Conference of Association of Nigerian Geographers (ANG), University of Lagos, Nigeria (April 10–15, 2016). Comments and interventions during the conference are gratefully acknowledged. Authors especially thank the 2013/2014 final-year students of the Geography Department, University of Nigeria, for their commitment and participation in the project on which this article is based. Thanks to the editors and reviewers of the Journal of Environmental Education for providing excellent feedback.

Notes

1. Prior to 2008, solid waste management (SWM) was not a major research theme in the Department of Geography. The Waste Management and Recycling Research Unit (WM&RRU) was thus set up in that year for advocacy in the waste sector and to coordinate research and publications in waste and resource management for the Department (Nzeadibe and Ajaero, 2011).

2. Academic Freedom here generally refers to the ability of a faculty member to engage freely and openly in scholarship, research and innovation activities. It includes the right to question and challenge traditional norms, and the freedom to define research questions, to pursue answers to those questions by way of unrestricted but proper investigative techniques and to disseminate the knowledge gained to students, academic colleagues and the society in general (University of Nigeria, 2013, p. 6).

3. Focus group discussion as an approach to students' evaluation of courses has been recommended by the NUC for the social science disciplines (National Universities Commission, 2007, p. 10).

4. Minutes of Board Meeting of Geography Department held on February 12, 2013. It is the same spirit to maintain and be in tune with the dynamic nature of the discipline that the Department in 2013 revised the curriculum and expanded its scope to include courses relevant to cultural sustainability. The inclusion of spatial management concepts is to emphasize the importance of interactive social geography which implies that geographers support and help in the management process of change where it happens (Department of Geography, 2015a).

5. Minutes of the meeting of Curriculum Committee, Faculty of the Social Sciences held on February 21, 2013.

6. Onokala et al. (2015) note that “virtually every project written in the Department contains as a rule of thumb, implication of findings and conclusion for the Nigerian people and the Nigerian environment” (p. 15) and that environmental management accounted for 15% of all undergraduate students’ projects submitted in the Department (p. 16).

7. The Vice Chancellor and Senate of the University of Nigeria had earlier given provisional approval for the new program at the 158th meeting of the Senate on December 12, 2014 (Department of Geography, 2015b, p. ii).

8. Despite the suggestions to the contrary, it was observed that the students' views are often moderated by their socio-cultural background and their lived experiences during their upbringing in their home locales.

9. The Niger Delta as a cultural region is where civil society activism and civic engagement have become an everyday way of life. These have severally been deployed to press for sociopolitical changes, economic empowerment, and in the struggle for socio-environmental justice with corporate bodies and governments. As a result, it is hardly surprising that the students from this region are associated with “activist” perceptions and outlook. For more in-depth discussion of civil society activism in the Niger Delta struggle, see, for example, Anugwom and Anugwom (2009); Ikelegbe (2005).