An Adult Education Practitioner in Africa: An Opportunity for Relearning.

I became interested in international adult education as a result of being in a doctoral program at Florida State University, where the adult education doctorate was very closely aligned with the International Intercultural Development Education ODE) program. Both programs were housed within the Educational Foundations Department in the College of Education; many of the IIDE students included adult education courses as a part of their curriculum. Additionally, both IIDE and the Adult Education and the Instructional Systems Design program (housed in the Educational Psychology Department) enrolled a significant number of international students from Korea, Latin America, and Africa. I originally intended my graduate focus to be in human resource development. However, not long after engaging in class discussions with international classmates and hearing their quite distinct perspectives, questioning both what they often perceived as very American approaches to learning as well as the value of American ideals and culture, I became attracted to adult education in developing countries. African Countries as the Context for My International Work I have taught in university settings in both Nigeria and Kenya. In both countries, I was fortunate to have not only the opportunity to teach in formal educational environments, but also to design and deliver two nonformal educational programs. In Nigeria, all my students were Nigerian graduate students in an adult education master's program. Most of them worked in adult education agencies and were either on leave or working part-time in order to obtain their master's degrees (not so different from student circumstances in the United States). In Kenya, I was selected to teach in the American-based branch of United States International University (USIU). My charge in both cases was to teach teachers using participatory and learner-centered techniques. Since both Nigerian and Kenyan schooling systems were heavily influenced by British colonialism in the early 1900s, learner-centered approaches do not typically prevail in the schools. However, in Kenya, the state-funded university where the College of Education was housed was on strike, so I taught Introduction to Management and an ethics course in an MBA program at the Kenyan branch of an American university--USIU. At USIU, my students were predominantly middle- to upper-class Kenyans, with a scattering of students from various other countries, such as Norway, Brazil, and Uganda. Some of these students were the children of ambassadors to Kenya. In Nigeria, I initiated a relationship with the Agency for Mass Education (AME) which was responsible for adult literacy programs throughout Borno State. Borno, one of 36 Nigerian states, had a population of approximately 3 million people in 1994 when I was there. I was granted an opportunity to visit several of these programs around Maidugnri (the state capital)--two programs for women and a program for tradespersons. Additionally, I had many conversations with Bintu, my friend and our cook, who experienced multiple frustrations in learning to read through adult literacy programs in Maiduguri. Based on my observations of the visited programs and Bintus's tales of woe, I asked if I could conduct a needs assessment of literacy program supervisors and program directors to ascertain if a professional development program for supervisors might be beneficial. Based on the results, I wrote a proposal to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to fund a program consisting of three components: low- or no-cost materials; supervisory practices; and teaching tips. After the UNDP granted funding, we added skills training for women, which included how to purify water and how to store vegetables. I had two goals: a) provide the needed training and b) model a collaborative planning process between the AME and the university adult education faculty. …