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You
are here: What American Know-How Has to Learn:
Lessons Learned Working in Haiti
by John Engle and Steven Werlin
How can Haitians and Americans work together to respond constructively to address the problems that face Haiti? Amid Haiti's great poverty and political strife, there is much work to be done. The country's problems are immense, complex, and intertwined. There are no easy solutions. But if well-intentioned Americans equipped with relevant know-how want to partner with our Haitian brothers and sisters working to better their country, we must first learn to listen.
For the past several years, the two of us have been involved in a variety of efforts to improve Haiti's educational system. John, an American, moved to Haiti in 1991 to serve as field director for a US-based nonprofit organization that was funding Haitian schools and literacy programs. He soon discovered that the authoritarian approach to education and leadership most popular in Haiti was largely failing to empower students to take responsibility for their learning. As John and his colleagues searched for alternative methods, he encountered Steven, an American university professor who had more than ten years experience in discussion-based education with Touchstones Discussion Project.
The need for a more empowering approach to education in Haiti was clear to Steven from his very first visit to the country in 1996. On that trip Steven visited an adult literacy center inspired by the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. The center is located at a Catholic sisters' residence in Delmas, a poor and overpopulated area of Port-au-Prince. The sister who ran the center led her visitors through a series of dark, cramped classrooms that were poor in materials, space, light, and comfort—but rich in the life of the mind and the heart.
Adult students sat tightly packed in rows of small wooden benches made for little kids. These benches had desktops built into them, so they would have been uncomfortable for these grown men and women even without overcrowding. In front of the students stood their teachers--encouraging, asking, correcting, inviting, and working hard with their classes every minute.
Soon the sister leading the tour took over one of the classes. Perhaps she wanted to show the students off. She invited students to ask Steven questions, and he had the chance to ask them questions, too. The sister's manner with her students highlighted much of what was good in the classes. She was intensely engaged with the students, and they answered her with their own seriousness and excitement. They were thoroughly involved in the lesson she was leading, a lesson that took its departure from specific questions about their lives.
But there were clearly problems. Despite the students' engagement and enthusiasm, the students had little opportunity to show initiative in the educational process. As was their custom, the sister followed a pre-ordained series of questions that was used in every session. One was, "What causes that?" Another was, "What follows from that?" The "that" in each day's discussion might vary, but the form of the questions never did, and the students had little space to ask other questions or to speak with each other. Every part of the discussion was mediated by the sister. There were no silent, reflective moments. The sister, the conversation's driving engine, never took a moment's rest. And she wasn't going to let the students take a moment's rest, either.
The situation was inspiring in several ways. Clearly, the students were deeply committed to their education. They accepted the discomfort, the crowding, the sacrifice of time and energy because they wanted to learn to read. Second, the school was making an active effort to engage the Haitian students in their own education. So much of traditional Haitian education depends on rote memorization of texts in French that have little to do with students' lives. These students were involved in an exciting conversation, in Creole, that focused on the things that mattered to them everyday.
Yet Steven was frustrated at how controlled the intellectual atmosphere seemed to be. Though the students were enthusiastically engaged in their work, their enthusiasm was tightly controlled by their teachers. There was no way for students in these classes to follow their own initiative, to develop the habit of questioning. Steven walked away from that visit believing (along with John and his colleagues) that a new approach was necessary if students were to learn to question, and not just learn to follow their well-meaning teacher's lead.
Since that time, the two of us along with other colleagues have been involved in efforts to introduce a more discussion-based classroom model into education in Haiti. At first we hoped this might be done relatively easily. We knew there would be many logistical issues. We would have to develop new educational materials--translating texts into Creole and produce books. We knew we would face difficulties with scheduling and transportation. But we were fully prepared to work through those. And Steven had enough experience teaching this approach to American schoolteachers that we were very optimistic about our work with Haitian teachers.
Our plan was to hold two-day workshops for Haitian teachers. We'd bring several cases of books, offer two days of intensive training, provide all the teachers enough books for their classes, and they'd be ready to use the method that became known as Wonn Refleksyon (Reflection Circles). We carefully planned these two-day trainings: what to do the first hour, the second hour, etc. And the teachers we worked with seemed every bit as excited as we were about these new approaches. It all went as planned.
But things turned out much differently than we'd hoped. Teachers, who had enthusiastically embraced our approach while talking with us, went back to their own classrooms without a strong sense of what we wanted them to do or of why they should do it. Books collected dust (which in Haiti is considerable,) or they were used in ways that didn't resemble what we'd intended. Some of the teachers half-understood. They knew they were supposed to let students do the talking, so they shut up entirely. Or they understood that students should be allowed to ask their own questions, so they browbeat them into speaking up. Or they simply lectured about the lessons they found in the stories they were reading together.
When we talked to teachers about their experiences and observed their work, we didn't know if we should be excited by their enthusiasm or frustrated by our own sense that they weren't catching on. One thing became clear. We needed to talk more with the teachers-- and that had to include listening to the teachers.
From the moment we decided to make listening to the teachers an essential part of our approach, we discovered something we should've known all along. Those teachers were working in very particular circumstances that they understood far better than we did. If we wanted to help them improve their work in the classroom, we would have to start from where they were-- not from what our theories told us.
That very obvious realization has turned our educational program around. There are now over 100 teachers throughout Haiti participating effectively in programs they have designed in partnership with us. These programs are based in part on expertise that we brought to Haiti with us. But they have also been shaped dramatically by the insights and experiences of the Haitian teachers.
What we have learned while working in the field of education is relevant to anyone seeking to introduce outside expertise into a foreign environment.
In Haiti, as elsewhere, any position of power is a license to talk and not listen, to tell and not ask, to demand and not serve. Unfortunately, the command-and-control style of leadership plagues the field of development with the predictable result of conflict. Haiti is sometimes called the graveyard of development projects. Foreigners come with good intentions. They partner with Haitians who are part of the professional class and together they impose their ideas on communities and grassroots groups. Most foreigners working in Haiti begin as we tried to. They don't take time to ask and co-create projects with the people who will be responsible for carrying them out. In a nation which has suffered from more than five hundred years of domination and exploitation-- first by outsiders and later by its own leadership-- that is a certain recipe for failure.
We'll be facing these same challenges again as we prepare for a new stage of our work in Haiti. John will soon be traveling back to that country to offer training in Appreciative Inquiry, an exciting approach to planning, leadership development, and team building. This technique originated in the US in the early 80's and is now being used around the world.
Appreciative Inquiry is based on two assumptions. First, that organizations always move in the direction of the questions their members ask and the things they study and talk about. And second, that energy for positive change is created when organizations engage continually in remembering and analyzing circumstances when they were at their best rather than focusing on problems and how they can be solved. The Appreciative Inquiry approach invites organizations to spend time creating a common vision for their desired future and developing the images and language to bring that vision to life.
During these two-day trainings, there will be a lot of time for participants to raise questions and issues of concern. We're excited to be working with a group of Haitian educators and community organizers who have considerable leadership skills. Many of these same folks have years of experience with Reflection Circles as well as Open Space, a technique for facilitating meetings where participants create the agenda.
As convinced as we are that Appreciative Inquiry will be a useful new tool for these Haitian leaders, we are just as convinced that they'll make the decisions about how to use it in their own contexts. We have no doubt that they'll embrace it if they see it as useful. And we're sure that they'll let us know if they don't believe it's useful.
But what's most likely is that they'll see parts of the approach as suiting their situations, and other parts that don't. Then they'll take up the task of working together to build something unique that responds to the needs of their own communities and institutions.
Steven Werlin, Ph.D., has served as Dean at Shimer College for the last three years. He has spent a total of three years in Haiti since 1996 and will be moving there again in January for an extended period as Director of Shimer's Haiti program.
John Engle, who lived in Haiti from 1991 to 2004, cofounded Port-au-Prince-based Limye Lavi Foundation and Norristown, Pennsylvania-based Beyond Borders. He coordinates and raises funds for The Experiment in Alternative Leadership, a Beyond Borders program, from his home in Hershey, Pennsylvania, making regular trips to Haiti.
©March 2005 New Horizons for Learning
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