Education for Liberation

Most Haitians have a deep faith in the value of education. Poor Haitian families will even go hungry to save money so they can pay tuition for schooling. The tragedy is that the education available for most of these families rarely provides anything of lasting value to their children. Teachers in most Haitian schools have no training to teach and are often barely literate themselves. Lacking any other model, most teachers perpetuate the only model of education they know, an authoritarian tradition that leads them to beat and humiliate their students into submitting to mind-numbing busy work—copying and memorizing irrelevant texts in French, a language neither students nor teacher speak.

Today, though most schools are still very authoritarian, alternative approaches to education are beginning to multiply. There is a deep hunger for more effective and liberating models of education.

Beyond Borders works to identify and support worthy alternatives. We ask the follow questions of any educational model: Is it based on mutual respect? Are the pedagogical practices interactive and participatory? Are learners actively engaged as agents in their own liberation? Does the effort promote skills and understanding needed to build better communities? Here are some of the initiatives in Haiti that we believe respond positively to these questions and that we are currently supporting and working to replicate:

The Reflection Circle Project

In the traditional classroom students sit facing the teacher who serves up a dry text that students must swallow whole, without understanding it, without questioning it. The Reflection Circle Project (Pwojè Wonn Refleksyon in Haitian Creole) seeks to do something subversive to this tradition—it introduces open classroom discussion of texts.

Each week students move their benches to sit with their teacher in a circle and read together a text in their native language. The texts are diverse, drawn from many different cultures and periods in history, and are selected for their ability to provoke discussions on issues of universal significance. Instead of copying or memorizing these texts as if they were sacred, students discuss them openly, reflecting upon them, questioning them, relating them to their experience, agreeing or disagreeing with them and with one another.

Week by week students learn skills they need for the exercise of democracy—how to listen and read attentively, to speak clearly, to think critically, and to disagree respectfully. The teacher learns to trust both their students’ ability to learn without coercion and to take responsibility for their own education.

The Reflection Circle methodology is adapted from the methods and materials pioneered by The Touchstones Discussion Project. We are grateful for their generosity and wisdom without which this project would not be possible.

>> Learn more about the Wonn Refleksyon project.

The Rotalpha Project

The Rotalpha project is a new independent Haitian initiative that trains Haitians to become literacy instructors. Rotalpha trains the instructors, but the communities and organizations where the instructors serve provide everything else—an instructor’s salary, teaching materials, classroom furniture and the locale. This allows each program site to become essentially self-supporting once the teachers are trained. This approach helps prevent an unhealthy dependence on foreign funds and makes the project more accountable to the people in the community.

Rotalpha is a project initiated by a local Rotary Club in Haiti. Beyond Borders supports this project by providing management and technical support through our sister organization in Haiti, Fondasyon Limyè Lavi. In the year and a half that the project has been functioning over 120 literacy instructors have been trained in the Rotalpha methodology. Instructors participate in an initial 40-hour course. Nearly 40 instructors now work in two urban and three rural project sites where they receive additional in-service supervision and training from Rotalpha staff. Rotalpha instructors teach literacy in a very "hands on" way, using the words, stories, and knowledge of their students rather than the passive repetition or copying of someone else’s words from a book.

>> Read an article about a particular Rotalpha literacy center.

The Matènwa Community Learning Center

Matènwa Community Learning Center is a remarkable rural elementary school and teacher training center that is leading the way in training teachers to channel rather than fight the natural curiosity of their students. Teachers learn how to non-violently manage their classrooms by using their students’ thirst for understanding as the motivation for learning rather than fear of punishment.
Teachers are trained at the center to engage their students with written texts in a radically new way. In contrast to the traditional approach which forces children to memorize long passages without understanding their meaning, teachers learn to use the words, stories, and knowledge of their students as the basis for literacy instruction. Students begin making their own books by hand, illustrating and even binding the text with their own hands. The method is inexpensive and allows a community school or literacy center to build up a library of books—its own books.

>> Read a more detailed account of this methodology.