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O'Neill Center director delivers "can-do" message to Nigerian conference
By Tracy Baumann
Oct. 6, 2008
Thelma Obah, Ph.D., director of the O’Neill Center for Academic Development, delivered the keynote address at the 11th Biennial Conference and Silver Jubilee Celebration of the Reading Association of Nigeria (RAN) Oct. 8 at the University of Uyo, Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria.
RAN promotes critical reading literacy in Nigeria. “It’s an honor to be recognized as one who helped in the association’s formative years,” says Obah, a RAN founder who hails from Jamaica and lived in California and spent 20 years in Nigeria, her husband’s home, before returning to the United States. “I can remind them of where we’ve been, and point to the future with some ideas that I bring from St. Catherine.”
She applauds RAN’s success — increasing the interest in, knowledge of and advocacy for the teaching and learning of reading and writing in Nigeria — and urges continued strong efforts “to help our children succeed in literacy and in life.”
What is the role of the O’Neill Center at St. Catherine?
The O’Neill center is the learning center for the St. Paul campus. Our mission is to provide academic support for students. It has three centers under one roof — writing/reading, math /science and resources for disabilities. We work as a drop-in center where students can come for tutoring.
I often say to our tutors, “If students are at the heart of this college, then you are the heartbeat.” We train our tutors to join a conversation with students who come to them for help, because we want the tutors to know that those students have something to say and that we are only companions to help them say it better. Even with math, we are not going to do the work for the students, but we model how to do it.
It’s a conversation — and through conversation we are able to accomplish that which one person couldn’t do alone. That’s the power of this work.
What is the Reading Association of Nigeria?
The Reading Association of Nigeria, or RAN, promotes reading literacy — not just basic literacy, but critical reading literacy — and brings awareness of the importance of reading and writing in terms of using the library, in terms of lifelong reading skills and in terms of reading for academic purposes.
It’s not that folks weren’t reading and people weren’t going to college in Nigeria before we founded RAN, but there was no focused awareness that we could teach critical reading beyond the elementary level. It took some work for people to recognize that there is more to reading than just decoding the alphabet, and that reading is valuable and important and not just for elementary age learners. There needed to be pride around it.
Nigerians are second-language learners in the sense that they all tend to have a native home language. But the language of their education is English. So they talk in English, but they view it as their second language.
They have always been aware of illiteracy and make a distinction between those who can’t read and those who can. But once people could read, the matter ended. We were trying to say that there is more to reading and more to comprehension. That’s what was motivating us.
A group of folks who were aware of what the International Reading Association had been doing in the United States got together to form RAN 25 years ago, with the thought that “Why can’t we bring the same ideas together and begin to promote the fact that reading is vital?”
Today there are strong centers of RAN in various parts of the country, where 25 years ago there was only the one.
How did the invitation to deliver the keynote address at its 25th anniversary celebration come about?
I was a founding member of RAN, and I can bring the memories of how we started and what it was like before we started. There are many people they could have invited to speak — and I’ve been away from Nigeria for eight years. So, it was an honor to be invited and recognized as one who helped in the early formative years of that association.
And so in my speech, I saw myself as someone who could remind them of the past and where we’ve been and point to the future with some ideas that I bring from St. Catherine.
What types of ideas did you bring from your work at St. Catherine?
I talked about peer-based tutoring, where the student tutors and mentors, who are paid for their efforts, are carefully selected on the basis not merely of excellent academic standing but soundness of character and willingness to share with others.
I told them that I would love to see RAN offer leadership in the provision of academic support for students with disabilities, visible and invisible.
I also reiterated a call I made in 1987 to make reading a pervasive part of our academic climate, where I recommended that Nigerian universities and colleges give attention to the training of all teachers, not just English teachers, in literacy strategies. Whether we are in agriculture, mathematics or other areas, we are all teachers of the reading and writing of our disciplines.
How does your work with RAN and your previous experience inform your work at St. Catherine?
In a learning center like the O’Neill Center, for example, a student may come in and ask for help writing a paper when she really needs help with reading. My experience in RAN and my work with reading (Obah wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on reading comprehension processes of university students who are second language learners and has since worked in writing centers in Canada and the United States.) helped me recognize the close integration between reading and writing.
So when we train tutors to work with students, we are opening their eyes to the fact a student’s difficulty with writing may have come about because she didn’t understand the assignment or the books on which it was based or she hadn’t done the critical thinking that would help her write the paper.
My work in this area tells me that these things can be taught, but we are often unaware that there is a need to teach them. I think I really bring that attitude that “you can do it”— that can-do spirit.
Contact Tracy Baumann, (651) 690-6521
