Effectiveness of collapsible classrooms in nomadic education

Apart from the ‘Literacy by Radio’ programme adopted by the National Commission for Nomadic Education (NCNE) to offer instructions and messages to nomadic pupils who are said to be typically on the move while grazing their cattle, the use of collapsible or mobile classrooms in basic education has also been effective in improving their literacy […]

Apart from the ‘Literacy by Radio’ programme adopted by the National Commission for Nomadic Education (NCNE) to offer instructions and messages to nomadic pupils who are said to be typically on the move while grazing their cattle, the use of collapsible or mobile classrooms in basic education has also been effective in improving their literacy rate.

Children of migrant fishing families, too, receive instructions through the mobile classrooms.  Each classroom has a space to serve between 15 and 20 pupils and could be assembled or disassembled within 30 minutes. The classrooms and their furniture are carried by pack animals or motor caravans.

The commission’s Public Relations Officer, Fidelis Idoko, said teachers who are well trained and held positive attitude to multi-grade teaching move with the nomads to provide effective education to their children. He said teachers, who are more often than not, familiar to the pupils, handle classes with more than one grade level successfully.

The commission has developed a beneficial rapport with nomadic families through provision of services to them on livestock health care, feed, fodder production and extension service while the nomads in turn allow their children to attend school, Idoko said.  The extension agents, he said, built trust with the nomads to the extent that they offer functional literacy for adults too.

“The extension agents follow the movement of the nomads and put the commission in the picture of where they settle and the teachers later set up the classrooms around them. These collapsible classrooms are mostly for high mobile groups of nomads,” he said.

The essence of the system is to provide quality education to nomadic children and at the same time preserve their traditional way of life.

Most of the highly mobile nomads do not live in one place rather, they move periodically or cyclically with their large herds and families in search of pasture, Idoko said, and because the school-age children of the nomads tend cattle mainly between 11am and 2 or 3pm, multi-grade teachers adopt ‘flexible timetable’ to meet the needs of both the pupils and the teachers.

The pupils would attend classes between 8am and 11am and would be allowed to move their herds to grazing areas until they close. “The pupils will at least do three lessons in the morning before they move their herds to forage for pasture. They may return to classrooms in the afternoon to continue with their lessons, depending on the arrangement, but in most cases, they return home and do their chores,” he said.

In some instances, instructors deliver lessons in their mobile classrooms in Fulfulde language and some objects in the course materials are substituted with Fulani names to enable pupils to easily assimilate.

Collapsible classrooms are not necessarily meant for herders who move their cattle ceaselessly from one grazing area to the other; they are also set up in permanent schools especially as additional classrooms and could be found in the commission’s basic schools at Ladugga Grazing Reserve in Kachia, Kaduna State and Paikon-Kore Grazing Reserve in the FCT where Fulani herders establish their individual camps. Mobile schools are operational in the River Benue area, Taraba, Benue, Adamawa, Nasarawa, Borno, and Yobe states.

The use of mobile classrooms is seen as a positive step towards the successful implementation of the provisions of the National Policy on Education (NPE) on equal access and the move is said to have been advantageous and yielded benefits based on the commission’s pupil achievement tracking method.

Many of the pupils that attended mobile schools have attained successes in various careers in life. A small number of the products of nomadic education have obtained doctorate degrees; some are medical officers while many have successfully completed higher education.

The commission, according to Idoko, tracks the achievements of pupils because it is fundamental to the schools and the authorities in assessing progress among others.