Doctor Billy Olajide is a renowned scholar based in the Department of Arts Education in the Faculty of Education at one of the leading universities in Africa, the University of Ilorin, in Kwara State in Nigeria. Dr Olajide is a specialist and has research interests in the areas of Language Education, Curriculum, Literacy development and Linguistics. He has extensive experience in Language Education and Teacher Education. He has taught a number of courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He is published widely locally, nationally and internationally. His publications include over 50 journal articles and book chapters. Dr Olajide has extensive supervisory experience as he has supervised over 60 postgraduate students to completion; the students include both Masters and Doctoral students. Dr Olajide is therefore most suitable to speak on issues of Language Education, Language, Curricula, and Literacy Development, which are a focus of the Colloquium. With his extensive experience in postgraduate research and research supervision, he is also most suitable to facilitate seminars for research students and academic staff during his visit. Both postgraduate and academic staff of the language and arts education will benefit from Dr Olajide’s knowledge sharing, as they will be engaging with him at the Colloquium and during seminar presentations that will be held.
REVITALIZING LANGUAGE EDUCATION IN CURRICULA AND AFRICAN LANGUAGES PEDAGOGY FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
A problem that much of multilingual Africa faces today is the relegation of the mother tongue in national arrangements, by which indigenous languages are hardly tolerated in education. Whereas most of the African learners have used the languages to acquire their worldviews that education should draw from for success, colonialism, neo-colonialism and the hydra head globalisation would seem to have conspired to stifle the indigenous language. Even though scholars and other stakeholders, through political debates and academic conferences like the present one, have been working for a redress of the worrisome situation, little success appears to have been recorded. Thus, this Keynote/Plenary Address is an attempt to re-examine the status and role of the indigenous language in African education and suggest strategies for making the mother tongue more prominent, for faster and sustainable development of the continent. The paper considers the strategies of a literacy-centred model that implicates several disciplines.