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For Mama Adobea Nii-Owoo, her hometown of Accra, Ghana, small town Ohio, Toronto, and Montreal have something in common.

They are places the recent �������� graduate has lived, worked and studied, but for Nii-Owoo – whose academic work focuses on Comparative and International Development Education – they are also locations that inspire her scholarship.

This is especially the case when she rides the bus.

“Public transport is an experience on its own,” says Nii-Owoo, from her home in Montreal – where she is a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University, “especially if you grew up working class or middle class, you have to take minivans to school. You have to navigate this as a kid. You have to navigate this as a worker.”

Between the structures of public transport in her homeland and Cuba (a place she has visited), the suburban bus lines surrounding Ohio University (where she earned her Master’s degree), and the built-up systems in Toronto and Montreal, what intrigues Nii-Owoo is not just the bumpy rides or the lovely people she would meet. It’s about the languages being used – the ones of riders and patrons and those of systems and authorities.

“I am absolutely fascinated by how people learn languages,” says Nii-Owoo. Specifically, “what stops people from learning languages, and why? I'm also fascinated by policy and how policy sets the agenda in education for learning languages.”

For her, city spaces and economies shape how languages are learned and how people engage with language – for instance, people may engage innovatively with language learning (such as on a bus or streetcar), which provides a support system for learners without them even realizing it. “People tend to make do with what they have,” she says.

Language education and her road to ��������

Nii-Owoo’s scholarship is closely tied to citizenship and nation-building – her work aims to recommend ways to enhance how people build belonging in their communities, while ensuring their language education is comprehensive and well-rounded. Much of this comes from her foundational experiences as a schoolteacher in Ghana and an educational background rooted in social and political theory from her homeland.

With a growing curiosity in language policy, she was drawn to �������� and what it could provide as a backdrop for language learning. “I came [to ��������] because I really wanted to learn from Canada, having—what I thought was a very clear, from the outside—a clear language policy, and having a language policy stance that was bilingual.”

She landed in Montreal in this time, dissertating at �������� while working at McGill. “I was fascinated, absolutely fascinated, with urban life and urban transportation and the language within language on the streets, language in the Metro,” she says. “I was translating that fascination while living in Toronto, my experience with the TTC – I had to learn all the stops by heart, on Line 1 and Line 2, going from east to west.

“I was acclimating myself within a city space after completing graduate school in a very small college town at Ohio University.”

Nii-Owoo’s work has, to date, garnered several prestigious awards, including the University of Toronto’s , the  (TIRF) in 2020, and the Queen Elizabeth II Advanced Scholarship.

Jeff Bale, Nii-Owoo’s doctoral supervisor, buoyed and guided her in this time, witnessing an academic who was growing as a leader – intellectually and professionally.

“Prof. Nii Owoo was extremely active and committed during her time as a doctoral student at ��������,” said Bale, a Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning. “She served in various roles in student governance, led small-scale research projects, one that stands out is an interview-based study with Deaf educators in Ghana.”

For Bale, Nii-Owoo enjoyed great success, for example publishing as a grad student and receiving invitations to contribute to edited volumes. “These invitations were based on the quality and novelty of her work,” he said. “Drawing from political and social theory from Ghanaian and other African scholars, as well as her lived experiences as a multilingual person and former schoolteacher from Ghana, Prof. Nii Owoo challenges us to recognize the multilingual authority of Ghanaian teachers as a legitimate source of decision-making in language education and language policies.”

For Bale, the strength of Nii-Owoo’s arguments, and her dynamic analysis of the multilingual authority of Ghanaian teachers, spans time. “Her analysis asks us to think differently about the history and future of language education in Ghana and other multilingual contexts.”

Her scholarship, on film

Much of that academic focus has not just ended up in scholarly writing. She directed, wrote and produced – where she transports viewers to the streets of Accra. There, people speak an incredible 84 languages. The film is borne out of her work with Ghanaian teachers during her doctoral journey at ��������.

“I ended up bringing my filmmaking background into sharing stories about teachers who have had to make sense of changing language policies that they themselves are still grasping and kind of struggling to process and understand, because they have to deal with language laws,” she said.

Nii-Owoo wanted to answer why African teachers manage to teach with so many languages and how Ghana itself ended up with two language policies.

“I wanted to make a documentary about this very important issue, break down the research, the history and the stories and narratives from teachers about policy challenges they're having – the messages that they want to share to policy makers, to the government, to parents, you know, to other teachers in a format that was more accessible. I wanted my research to be accessible.”

The film has since screened at the International Black and Diversity Film Festival this summer, was officially selected and screened at the  and most recently was nominated and part of the lineup for the Toronto International Nollywood Film Festival.

And so, Nii-Owoo’s work continues to cross into new territory, seeking understanding and advocacy for better policy. All of this work has been incredibly rewarding, she says.

“I will tell you that one of the most rewarding aspects of this work has been the privilege of being exposed to material that I probably would never have been exposed to in my lifetime if I hadn't gone into academia,” she says.

She says a lot of her time at �������� has been formative to her work now. “I think �������� gave me the skills, the training to do these things. It made me more assertive in the kinds of questions that I was asking and in the kinds of critique that I was making.”