ABSTRACT
The education landscape in Nigeria is often portrayed as a simple north-south divide, with high levels of participation noted in schooling in the south, where a majority of the population are Christian, and lower levels evident in the north, with a majority Muslim population. This regional division comes to be further essentialised in political imaginaries with a homogenised portrayal of the ‘Muslim north’. The murderous attacks by Boko Haram in several northern and central Nigerian states, many with a target on children at school, have further concentrated this essentialised portrayal. The aim of this paper is to present the very varied engagements with education and questions of criticality and equality by student teachers from very different predominantly Muslim societies, communities and locales in the northern states of Nigeria. At the heart of the paper is data collected as part of a collaborative study by a team based in the UK and Nigeria following a cohort of final-year education students through their studies and into their first phase of work. Data reported here was collected in 2014. Three northern states – Jigawa, Sokoto and Kano – are included in the study. The paper presents data from the first phase of the study, alongside data from the Annual School Census reports to draw out the views of the students in these three states regarding engagements with a range of issues concerning work in education, social inclusion and perspectives on gender equality, and the different education landscapes they inhabit. It sets them in the context of the different education histories of the three states, and contrasting aspects of political economy. It thus reveals severe limits in the simplified north-south dichotomies when analysing education in Nigeria.
