While schools in the US and many other countries have computer labs and are wired for the Web, most classrooms in Haiti are not even wired for electricity. Walk into the average Haitian classroom and you will find some students without even a single schoolbook. Most schools in Haiti require students to buy their own books. But for parents who can barely afford the $3 or $4 per month for tuition, books are a luxury.

In the typical Haitian school, even students with books are not necessarily better off. Most Haitian schoolbooks supply dull texts about irrelevant topics, usually in French—a language neither the teachers nor the students speak. Few primary school teachers in Haiti have themselves graduated from high school. Fewer still have any training to teach. Consequently, they tend to use books ineffectively, requiring their students to mindlessly copy and memorize texts they rarely understand. Students risk beatings and humiliation if they then fail to recite texts properly. In such an environment students can take years to become literate and often drop out before achieving this goal.

It is in this setting that Beyond Borders is fostering a new teacher training initiative undertaken cooperatively with several local Haitian Rotary Clubs. This initiative, called Rotalpha, introduces a new way of teaching literacy to both children and adults. It is based on the Concentrated Language Encounter (CLE), a methodology promoted by Rotary International in dozens of developing countries around the world. Teachers help students learn to read and write not by forcing them to memorize someone else’s words in a foreign language, but by using the students’ own words to help them write their own books.

Here is how it works:

Choosing the Topic: Teachers, sometimes with help from their students, choose a topic that is of interest or relevant to their lives. Students may already know a great deal about the topic. For example one group of young students recently wrote a book about how to make a kite. (Haitian children are remarkably skilled at making kites out of almost nothing.)

Discussing the Topic: The teacher and students discuss the topic together to draw out what they already know. When the topic is a story, the students will sometimes act out the story, or draw scenes from the story with crayons.

Writing their Words: Then the teacher writes the words of the students—in this case the steps to making a kite—in big letters for all to see on large pieces of paper. The teacher then reads the students’ words back to them.

Making the Pages: During this stage of the process, tasks are often divided up among the students. Some students will illustrate different portions of the text. More advanced students may carefully write a portion of the text for the book or copy it from what the teacher has written. All students should be involved in copying the text. It can be broken down into phrases, lines, or sentences so that it is not too overwhelming.

Binding it Together: The illustrations and text are then brought together. A heavier piece of construction paper or poster board serves as a cover, and a needle and thread are used to bind the book. The title, author, and date of the book are written in the appropriate places. The book is then placed in the school library and read over and over again.
There is a multitude of variations a skilled teacher can make on this theme. Teachers are also taught to use the texts the students generate for a phonics-based approach to literacy training. For example, the teacher can pull from a text a new letter or sound the students haven’t been introduced to yet and feature it in a lesson that pulls in other words that use the same letter or sound.

The topics students write about vary greatly. Sometimes they will write an imaginative story they have invented or that their teacher has read to them. They may write a story from the Bible. Sometimes they choose topics about things of practical importance. For example, a book one class recently wrote summarized information they had gathered from a veterinary technician in the community about how to recognize and treat sick goats. This is a topic of great economic importance to both children and adults who often depend heavily on the health of their livestock.

In a short time the class library is growing and students are reading these books for themselves with comprehension and enjoyment. Eventually they will write their own books with no need of help from their teacher. For these students books are no longer static, alien, bricks in the walls of an authoritarian prison called school. Books are alive, accessible, and relevant. These students approach even books published in the more traditional manner with greater confidence and comprehension.

Says one teacher of the impact of this new methodology, “The climate in these classrooms has become one of exchange and cooperation among teachers and students. Teachers see that they do not need to control the students through beatings when they are actively engaged in their learning. Students now respect their teachers, themselves, and their school because they act through dialogue and reflection instead of silence and fear.”