Educational transformation by Governor Bala’s administration excites Aminu Saleh college Provost

By Mohammed Kaka Misau, Bauchi

Professor Asabe Sadiya Mohammed, the Provost of Aminu Saleh college of education Azare has expressed delight over the transformational drive of Governor Bala Mohammed in the education sector.

The Provost was speaking on Tuesday during an opening ceremony of a 5-day sensitization training workshop on the implimentation of Early Grade Reading Programme in colleges of education of the Northeast zone held at the Aminu Saleh college of education in Azare on Tuesday.

“We are declaring our total loyalty and unalloyed support to His Excellency, the Executive Governor of Bauchi state, Senator Bala Mohammed Abdulkadir, CON, Kauran Bauchi for his uncommon transformation of Aminu Saleh college of education Azare”, The Provost said.

She said Governor Bala Mohammed has put in place the needed infrastructural facilities and staff for the smooth conduct of both academic activities in the college.

“The doors of the governor has remained open to us, whenever we put a request he has never decline to answer us. The Governor is ours and he has pledged to support us further and further and we are certain that we are going to get all the support that he pledged to give us”, she added.

The Provost called on the students to dedicate themselves towards the pursuit of their destinies, adding that the management of Aminu Saleh college is poised to setting a standard for training of teachers.

“The teachers are ever positive, the teachers are ever the most important forces in the workforce of any nation because everyone that becomes anything, he or she starts with having a teacher, the parents are the teachers first,then the immediate nursery, primary or secondary, that’s where we meet the teachers”, Professor Asabe noted.

She added that, “we are here to serve as model, the Aminu Saleh college of education Azare has always been a model, a model to all teacher training institutions and in Sha Allah, through my leadership, we are going to maintain the status quo and hopefully we are going to try to make it even better than what we have met”.

Commenting on the workshop which was organized by the National Commission for Colleges of education held at the premises of the Aminu Saleh college of education in Azare, she noted that it was aimed at equipping the participants with the needed method of teaching children on how to read.

“It is not a matter of reading culture now, this is an early reading programme, that is how to learn to read at the early grades, that is from infancy, that is from pre primary to primary, that’s to teach children how to read”, she said.

On the advent of internet which has almost rendered some libraries obsolete, the Provost said, “when you talk about library, it is not just a junk of books but a library of e-words where you have a complete international library stocked in one file within a system”.

“So, when you go to a library and don’t see books it is not because people are not reading but because we want to utilize space, we want to have clean environment and in addition we want to have standard development with the other parts of the world, that is when we go online”, the further explained.

The professor who however, said having e-copy does not render hard books irrelevant, explained that many of the information are within the hard books which are turned into the soft copies.

“At times we need to revert back to the hard books for us to get the detailed information because at times these soft materials can become corrupted, so it is advisable to have both the e-library and the hard copies, that is why when accreditation team come to your institution, they go to the library to inspect both hard and soft copies”, she said.

Also speaking, the Deputy Director, National Commission for Colleges of Education Abuja, Dr. Moses Ade Afolabi said that the aim of the workshop was about Early Grade Reading (EGR).

Dr. Afolabi who is the team leader of the programme said a needs assessment research carried out by USAID in partnership with NCCE revealed that some of the pupils in primary schools cannot read even while they are up to primary three and recommended that training should be carried out on the teacher trainers.

According to him, “they partnered with NCCE and we selected some college lecturers and gave them training so that they can return back to their schools and train their students who are the trainee teachers so that they can be able to train their pupils at the end of their graduation in the various schools they work in order to change the focus of the country in terms of reading skills.