Education is a Conversation
by David Diggs
Shella Odnice has stopped forcing the once-abandoned child who now lives in her home to work as a slave. She now divides the work more evenly among everyone in the household.
Nikel Felix, from the rural community of Platon Yeye, says he used to do his farming “without giving much thought to it.” But now he’s introducing soil conservation measures such as plugging gullies with rock to slow runoff.
Nikel’s neighbor, another farmer, decided not to burn his field after the latest harvest as he’d always done. This year, he’s left the organic material to rot and nourish the soil.
In rural Haiti, changes like these do not come easily. Behavior is bound by tradition and people are reluctant to make changes—even when current practices are clearly destructive.
So what made the difference here? All three of these Haitians are part of an unusual adult education program we’ve developed in collaboration with two Haitian organizations, Fonkoze and the Limye Lavi foundation.
The first program focuses on the rights and needs of children. We’ll be using it to develop hundreds of volunteer child-rights advocates who will defend children from abuse and help stop the flow of children into domestic servitude. The second program focuses on sustainable agriculture and equips farmers to produce more food while repairing the damage traditional farming has done to the environment.
The power of this program to change behavior is even more remarkable when you see the ten thin textbooks that are used. They look like comic books. Each page is filled with colorful illustrations arranged in frames with narration and dialog below.
Look closer, though, and you’ll notice these “comic books” are different from any you’ve seen before. While the characters get into conflicts, they aren’t superheroes and villains slugging it out. They are typical Haitians fighting for life and dignity. A farmer confronts his neighbor because the neighbor’s goats have gotten into and destroyed his garden. A mother argues with her daughter who has become pregnant with the child of a boyfriend she wasn’t supposed to be seeing. Two siblings reunite after being separated early in life and surviving years of servitude and life on the streets.
These unique books and educational programs were developed under the creative direction of Dr. Kathleen Cash who several years earlier developed a similar program focusing on sexual and reproductive health with Fonkoze.
Dr. Cash combines expertise in education and ethnography with a gift for story development and illustration. She first trained a team of Haitian peer ethnographers who fanned out across Haiti over a seven-month period and recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with nearly 300 Haitian children, youth, and adults. After extensive ethnographic analysis of these interviews, Dr. Cash wrote thirty composite stories that captured the dominant themes and contradictions her research had uncovered. She then worked with a team of five Haitian artists to illustrate these stories. The books include these stories along with related authoritative information.
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The classroom should cultivate the habit of examining beliefs and behaviors.
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This unique approach pioneered by Dr. Cash has been used now in nearly a dozen countries. It has roots in both ethnography and a pedagogical theory called Popular Education, which was developed in Brazil in the 1960s to help oppressed and often illiterate people get more control over their lives. In a traditional classroom, students are judged by how much information they master. Mastering information, these theorists argued, isn’t enough. Education should equip students to gain mastery over their lives. This requires students to learn to judge and sometimes disagree with the information and ideas of others, to question assumptions, see new perspectives, and learn in any environment. The classroom should cultivate the habit of examining beliefs and behaviors.
This is all theoretical. So let’s peek into Shella Odnice’s adult literacy center to see Popular Education in practice. Shella’s teacher and fellow students are all sitting in a circle rather than rows to encourage open discussion among all the students. The teacher is reading the story of a girl named Esther who was sent into servitude by her father after her mother's death. “Is it right,” the teacher asks, “that Esther is forced to work all the time and is treated differently than all the other children in the household?” A lively discussion then leads Shella to decide to change her behavior toward the girl she has taken in.
The stories are engaging because they are drawn from the real struggles Haitians face. Stories often end abruptly without resolution, and students are invited to complete the story by taking on roles of various characters and improvising an ending. They then discuss the various choices their characters made.
Is there place in these classrooms for important information to be shared? There is. For example, in the agricultural program, a wide range of technical information is shared—the consequences of deforestation, how to make natural insecticides from native plants, how to select and preserve seed for the next planting, and much more. Yet all of this is shared in the context of stories and choices that are then discussed.
Because the stories are so memorable and well-illustrated, even illiterate participants can share them with their neighbors and continue discussions started in the classroom. And that is the real beauty of this pedagogical approach—learning continues after class, gets shared in conversations with others, and frees students to change themselves and their world.