Kreyòl, pedagogy, and technology for opening up quality education in Haiti: Changes in teachers' metalinguistic attitudes as first steps in a paradigm shift

Michel DeGraff and Glenda S. Stump argue that local languages, together with active-learning pedagogy and educational technology, are necessary but not sufficient for universal access to quality education. The case is Haiti, where French is the main language of school instruction although fluently spoken by about 5% of the population at most, while Kreyòl is spoken by all Haitians. The article describes the historical and sociolinguistic background and the MIT-Haiti Initiative, which has run seven faculty-development workshops in Haiti since March 2012 for more than 250 faculty, administrators and officials.

The authors coded participants' post-workshop evaluations from workshops 3 to 7, held between August 2013 and June 2016, and report that no response was wholly negative and that positive statements about Kreyòl as the language of instruction generally increased over successive workshops. They conclude with six recommendations for similar contexts and note the July 8, 2015 agreement between the Ministry of National Education and the Haitian Creole Academy.