2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Nigerian students account for more than a quarter of all African students in the US, having just recently overtaken Mexico as the United States’ 9th highest source of international students. These huge numbers, however, have not necessarily translated into seamless transitions for students who still have to cope with cases of systemic racism, discrimination, and microaggression. While schools boast of diversity and their promise of inclusion and equity continue to successfully attract these students, how might they deliver on these promises and actually create environments where these students feel prepped for success? I argue that the answer may lie not in the US, but in their home countries, by investigating the principles of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP). This paper shares emerging insights from an ongoing research investigating how engineering educators might provide culturally relevant engineering education to Nigerian and Nigerian International students. On the broader research project, a comparative case study using explanatory sequential mixed methods was designed surrounding engineering education in Nigeria and the US. This work-in-progress paper tells half of the story, focusing primarily on the emerging results in Nigeria. It contributes to the broader project by answering the following research questions: what are the conceptions of engineering educators in Nigeria and how do culturally relevant engineering educators support their engineering students in Nigeria? The paper leverages the socio-psychological teacher conceptions described by Gloria Ladson Billings’ CRP framework (conceptions of knowledge, of social relations, and conceptions of the self and others). Schools located in all six of Nigeria’s geopolitical zones and participants fluent in her three major spoken languages are represented in the study. The analyzed data for this study include surveys, in-person and virtual classroom observations, teacher reflection journals, classroom artifacts, school policy documents, and semi-structured interviews with 37 engineering faculty members, 2 provosts, 5 engineering college deans, and 2 students. The findings reveal a strong leaning for analogies and proverbs as analogical bridges engineering instructors in this context used when traditional experiments, classroom demonstrations, or local educational resources failed. Nuances of culturally-relevant teacher conceptions are discussed in light of CRP: using proverbs to build cognitive reasoning in Nigerian engineering classrooms; visual and auditory cues as a form of formative feedback; analogies as a pedagogical form; advocating for active and authentic learning through tutorials; leveraging the communal nature of the culture in the classroom; colonial antecedents responsible for certain school policies; manifestations of Ladson-Billings’ conceptions in this context; peculiarities of the three CRP criteria in this context. The paper concludes with useful suggestions for instructors looking for culturally relevant ways of supporting students of Nigerian students in their engineering classrooms.