Partner Institutions

Schools of Library and Information Management (SLIM) at Emporia State University (ESU), Kansas, U.S.A.      

Bayero University, Kano

Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria

The University of Maiduguri

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Sponsors

Bureau for Cultural and Educational Affairs

College and University Affiliation Program

U.S. State Department

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Program Objectives

  For All Partner Institutions

1. Establish telecommunication links between the institutions to facilitate communication for teaching, research, learning and program administration.
2. Undertake collaborative funded research to investigate the impact of civics education, community analysis, information and computer literacy workshops on civil organizations in Nigeria.

  For Nigerian Partner Institutions

1.  Provide faculty and staff members with opportunities to expand their knowledge and skills   in community analysis, information and computer literacy and global studies.
   
2. Revise the curricula to better reflect local and global perspectives.
3. Organize outreach service workshops to impart civic knowledge, skills and attitudes to civic organizations in Nigeria.

  For Emporia State University

1. Foster scholarly, professional and social interactions with diverse groups of people and ideas.
2. Strengthen the global studies courses and the curriculum in general by providing information on the Nigerian and other African information infrastructures.
3. Recruit international adjunct faculty to teach courses through the Internet.

  Mutual Benefits:

The activities of this program will establish a self sustaining partnership between the institutions; create for their students and faculty a learning environment that mirrors the multicultural and global information society, and contribute to knowledge of civic organizations and reforms in Nigeria and cultivation of a global civil society.

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Global Studies & International Activities

In 1995, SLIM advanced its commitment to globalization with the introduction of a global studies unit in the curriculum. The global courses cover international information transfer, infrastructure development and policy, and the global information economy. Student projects in these courses include audits of national information infrastructures, some of which are posted on Globenet; a web site set up to facilitate a global dialog on SLIM’s international activities. (http://slim.emporia.edu/globenet/).

SLIM’s international activities seek to foster development of a global civil society. One of the avenues by which this is pursued is through an international conference series. In 1997, SLIM organized the second of its conference series in Warsaw, Poland, at which librarians in Central and Eastern Europe discussed the role of information in restructuring for democracy. The conference proceedings, including interviews with participants, were web-cast globally, enabling participation by information professionals in U.S.A., South Africa, and Brazil. Records of the conference presentations on web-sites and CD’s are now routinely used as instructional resources. Another conference took place in Sophia, Bulgaria in November 2001.

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Educational Partnership Model

This partnership model was designed to avert the one-directional nature and consequent western bias of prevailing library education partnerships with Africa. In these models, the western (northern) partner was the more active institution, diagnosing needs, prescribing remedies, designing programs, and implementing and evaluating its impact on the southern partner institution. The latter was more often than not, a passive consumer of packaged northern programs.

The project is informed by the new epistemic paradigm which recognizes the complex nature of reality and the knowledge systems that seek to reflect and shape it. This perspective calls for integration of all participants and their indigenous knowledge and value systems in the planning and execution of the partnership activities. Accordingly, this project offers opportunities for faculty, students and staff to spend time together in each other’s countries, jointly working with and learning from each other. Knowledge generated from their experiences will also be “published” via cyberspace. For instance, data from community analysis studies by the civic organizations will be used to create local content databases to complement “western” information from cyberspace.

Previous partnership models reflected the prevalent information flow pattern of the print era: from the north to the south. Cyberspace provides an appropriate medium for the iterative and interactive communication entailed in the new partnership model. Postings on the project website and the products of collaborative faculty and student projects reflect the diversity of perspectives held by participants and, where possible, a synthesis of these perspectives. Knowledge developed from these experiences not only enriches the curricula of participating institutions but also contributes to policy discourse of national and global information infrastructures. This project offers a model for replication in other parts of Nigeria and Africa.

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Chronology of Activities

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Community Outreach: Public Libraries and Civil Society

Democratic and economic reforms assume the cultivation of a civil society in which the citizenry is informed and actively engaged in public discourse and civic life. Libraries have played a historical role in cultivating such a society by supporting intellectual freedom and diversity of ideas, lifelong learning and democratic access to information and education. Decades of military dictatorship undermined the capacity of Nigerian libraries to play this role in their communities. This project is designed to position libraries to rebuild the public sphere by sponsoring civic education classes and organizing information literacy and community analysis workshops for civic organizations. Libraries also provide forums for exchange of ideas and access to relevant information and social networks. Access to these resources empowers civic organizations in Nigeria to participate effectively in the ongoing reforms.

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Faculty Exchanges

The Nigerian faculty members will visit Emporia in pairs of one senior and one junior faculty member who teach in the same areas of specialization. This facilitates the development of a mentoring relationship between them, if none already exists. Technology training is a strong component of their training. They will attend information and computer literacy classes as well as laboratory sessions to enable them to teach, manage and retrieve information and communicate using technology both at Emporia and in Nigeria. In addition, they will attend the following regular courses in Emporia: Foundations of Information Transfer, Theoretical Foundations of Service, Global Information Infrastructure as well as workshops, seminars or individual tutoring on curriculum revision, community analysis, grant writing and civics education. They will also work with Emporia faculty in their specialization areas.

The regular courses cover issues relevant to development civil society such as intellectual freedom and diversity of ideas, cross-cultural communication, social and information equity and accommodation of individual and group differences. These courses are designed to raise the awareness and commitment of participants to the librarian professional ethics germane to cultivation of civil society.

The Nigerian faculty are mentored by their subject area colleagues in Emporia with whom they team-teach courses and discuss current developments and challenges in their fields. They also discuss and practice teaching strategies especially those designed to meet diverse learning styles. The Nigerian faculty are assisted with curriculum revision, design of syllabi for new courses, collection and repackaging of course materials into online formats such as WebCT, and CD-ROM, video and audio formats for on and off-line delivery. Grant writing workshops is organized to enable them prepare competitive proposals with which they could procure additional funds to support their research and outreach missions.

Opportunities are provided for them to interact with women’s and other civic organizations in Kansas and attend and possibly, present at one selected national conference related to their areas of interest. Discussions with mentors and other faculty and students at Emporia are continued on their return to Nigeira through private e-mails, or open discussion lists and the project web-site. These experiences not only reconnect them with the international scholarly and professional community, but also update their knowledge in their areas of specialization and upgrade their skills in technology, teaching methods, scholarship and programming for civil society.

Emporia exchange faculty team-teach with their Nigerian peers both in Emporia and in Nigeria and advise on implementation of the new courses and curriculum. They also train research assistants, collect research data and help maintain the technology at the partner institutions in Nigeria. While there, they team-teach workshops for Nigerian civic organizations and library associations, as well as attend and possibly present at national library conferences. They will also plan an international library conference to be held in Abuja in 2004 as part of Emporia's conference series. Nigerian and international sponsors will be sought for the conference.

These interactions, as well as the research project, upgrade the cross-cultural knowledge, skills and attitudes of Emporia faculty and students and enrich their curricula with knowledge of Nigerian civic organizations, reforms and information infrastructures. Joint student projects on these and other topics build partnerships between the students, socializing them into international professional networking.

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Student Exchanges

It is expected that before long, Nigerian and U.S. students will switch campuses to be immersed in the cultures of partner institutions and countries, while learning first hand the cross-cultural dimensions of the global information society.

During the summer of 2001, Brandon Barnett, a SLIM graduate student who has strong technology skills, and an interest in global information issues accompanied the faculty team to Nigeria. While earning independent study credits by participating in this project, she initiated a linkage between the student bodies in the various institutions. She attended classes and gave presentations to her peers on student life and library education in the U.S.  While in Nigeria, Brandon assessed the state of the university and library school technology, and set up and network technology units donated by SLIM with existing systems. Maintaining the technology, team-teaching technology courses, and presenting computer literacy workshops were also part of her responsibilities.  

Emporia State University students sent manuscripts to be published in the University of Maiduguri student journal.

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Evaluation

At the commencement of the program, the areas of need and strategic objectives will be assessed, and documented. This exercise will not only furnish a basis for designing relevant activities, but also serve as baseline data for assessing their impact later in the project. Each objective and activity will be assessed by its impact on faculty and student learning. The Steering Committees (SC) consisting of the exchange faculty and project director at each institution will continuously monitor and assess activities at their institution. The Steering Committees will generate reports at the end of each semester incorporating those of exchange faculty members.

The SC reports will assess the activities of the semester at the institution, including evaluations of learning imparted through courses, and workshops; and access to and use of cyberspace by all participants. The impact of the workshops on activities of the civic and library organizations will be assessed through the collaborative research project. The SC reports which will be posted on the project web-site, will indicate what objectives were met, unmet, and implications for revising the objectives and activities for the subsequent semester. The program directors will compile all the SC reports and analyze them with reference to progress made towards attainment of the eight project objectives at the end of each project year.

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Last Updated: November 30, 2004