Women’s Lived Experience of Education in Northern Nigeria

Abstract

This dissertation is a gathering of stories—of girlhood, struggle, hope, and resistance. It explores the lived educational experiences of women who grew up in Northern Nigeria, where the paths to learning were often shaped by layered intersections of gender, culture, religion, class, and power. Rather than speaking about women from the outside, this work listens to the stories they carry—and in doing so, it allows them to speak for themselves. Grounded in hermeneutic phenomenology and feminist thought, this study includes the voices of five women—myself among them—who reflect on their educational journeys as girls. Through in-depth interviews, artifacts, and storytelling, the women share their memories, emotions, silences, and dreams. The process of remembering becomes a form of meaning-making, and the act of telling becomes a quiet resistance to the ways we have been spoken for, simplified, or made invisible. Using a transcript-to-poetry approach, the study weaves personal artifacts—poems, drawings, reflections—into each story. These are not just stories of what happened; they are expressions of being. They show what it means to grow up within systems that constrain possibility, and what it means to push against those limits from within. At its heart, this dissertation asks: What happens when we tell our stories in our own words, from our own lives? What truths emerge when we trust women to name their own experiences? And how might these stories shift the way we think about education—not in abstraction, but in relation to real lives, real histories, and real hopes?