Nako aims to take doctoral lessons home to Africa

Bonodji Nako is committed to improving education in her home country, Chad.

The Fulbright scholar, at UNL this fall to begin work on her doctorate in education, will spend the next five years in Lincoln studying curriculum and instruction.

She will take the bus to campus and hitch rides to her apartment after her night classes. She will experience her first Midwestern winter. She will make do with phone calls home since she’s unlikely to come up with the funds to fly back to Africa to visit her husband and three young sons.

But she is not complaining about any of this. She is honored to be here and focused on her long-term goal of overhauling Chad’s educational system.

Chad has always been politically unstable, Nako said. Although the country is a so-called democracy, corruption is rampant and the same president keeps winning national elections. Social inequalities, a high rate of illiteracy, and tension between Christians and Muslims have reinforced the country’s instability, and leaders have capitalized on that turmoil to maintain power.

“People are fed easily with lies, and I believe that if people receive more education, they will start thinking for themselves,” Nako said.

Bonodji Nako, a Fulbright scholar, is in her first year studying curriculum and instruction at UNL. Nako hopes to take lessons learned at UNL to bolster education in Chad. Photo by Craig Chandler/University Communications.

Changing Chad’s educational system may be an uphill battle once Nako finishes her degree. Modeled on the traditional French curriculum, most classes in Chad are overcrowded and instruction is rarely interactive. Parents are for the most part uninvolved, because many are illiterate or do not recognize the value of schooling for their children. This is especially true when it comes to girls.

“There is a high rate of dropping out, especially among girls,” Nako said. “Not all girls are lucky enough to be sent to school; some parents still don’t see it as a priority. I will work on this especially when I go home.”

Given the climate in Chad, Nako’s own story is particularly remarkable. Her parents did not know how to read or write, but her father pushed her from an early age to excel in school. Nako loved languages (today, she is fluent in seven) and studied English as an undergraduate at the University of N’djaména. Her family wanted her to become a lawyer, but after graduation, she took a job teaching English at a Sudanese school. A year later, she met an American embassy employee whose wife ran the American International School of N’djaména, and that meeting resulted in a new teaching job for Nako, and her initial exposure to American curriculum and instruction.

In February 2008, civil war broke out in Chad and the country was declared an unsafe zone for American families. The embassy closed the school. It took Nako three sleepless weeks to gather the courage to meet with the school’s director and tell her, “Instead of shutting the school down, why don’t you let me run it?” Nako wrote a business plan, the embassy approved it, and after a name change – the school became the N’djaména English International School – Nako and her colleagues were back in business.

“It was quite an ambitious adventure, because we knew there were no longer any expat children, and the school was tuition funded,” Nako said. “If we wanted to keep the same standards as the American school, that meant a lot of money for rent, paying teachers, and paying taxes. That first year we had 48 students, and we had to bring tuition down six times lower than it had been. Even then, only high-class Chadians could afford to send their kids there.”

This year, enrollment has climbed to 93 students, and a colleague of Nako’s is running the school in her stead. The school’s curriculum, which Nako wrote, is based on several American states’ curricula.

When she applied for a Fulbright to study in the U.S., Nako already knew about Lincoln. The American International School in Chad had enrolled some of its students, via distance education, in the Independent Study High School, a University of Nebraska program that educates students from around the world.

Nako was at the top of the Fulbright selection list, and – quite randomly – the Fulbright committee sent her application to UNL. Although she jokes that she was wary of Nebraska winters, Nako was thrilled to come to Lincoln, which meant she could develop an in-person relationship with the Independent Study High School and maintain contact with high school students in Chad.

Now in her first year at UNL, Nako is determined to absorb as much knowledge as she can.

“I will focus on innovative teaching methods and curriculum design, and I want to learn as much as I can about what works,” she said. She plans to teach at the university level when she returns to Chad, and also work for the government’s curriculum design office.

“I believe that education is the key to changing things,” Nako said. “In a sense, I’ve almost given up on adults, and I want to build on children’s minds. I want to put innovative things in the curriculum that will help children understand they can change their lives.”

– By Sara Gilliam, University Communications