EHE News
Goodbye rote learning, hello modern teaching
Haiti outreach encourages modern teaching methods
When Associate Professor Terri Teal Bucci first visited Haiti in 2003, she found 50 to 60 children crammed into each small classroom, parroting back their teachers' words. Today, Bucci, faculty colleagues and graduate students continue to work with their Haitian counterparts to transform the educational system. More trips to Haiti are needed to free children from an outdated, oppressive educational system.
Schools free but few
Dr. Terri Teal Bucci with Dr. Jean Ele Larrieux, the director of CREFI and vice rector of the University of Notre Dame Haiti, as they walk through Anse-d'Hainault on the southwestern peninsula of Haiti.
"Schools may be free in Haiti," says Bucci, a mathematics education faculty member in the School of Teaching and Learning, Mansfield Regional Campus, "but there aren't enough of them, and there aren't enough teachers to educate everyone, even including the private schools."
Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with 8 million residents who earn a per capita income of $361 per year.
Bucci makes a difference with what she does best: teacher preparation. Inspired by the Ohio State land-grant mission, she committed to making the world a better place and opening the world to Ohio State students through the Haiti Empowerment Project.
Bucci's progress merits accolades. With three visits per year, each for 10 days, she has built collaborations with teacher educators at local universities, the minister of education, and local schools. The shared goal is to help all teachers in Haiti obtain at least the equivalent of a teaching certificate from a two-year school.
Many Haitian schools still rely on outmoded memorization methods, so Bucci started her work with teachers at two rural elementary schools: Benito School, a private school in Gallette, Haiti, and Faith Academy, a private school in Croix de Bouquets, Haiti.
Introducing a new learning environment
Children study in a classroom at Faith Academy in Croix de Bouquets, Haiti.
Based on the trust built with their American mentors, teachers at the two rural schools are now working to transform the teaching methods in their classrooms. In these laboratories, teachers experiment with innovative teaching, demonstrating how modern pedagogy works in Haitian schools.
"It's all well and good to see practices modeled in the U.S.," Bucci points out, "but to give teachers faith, they must see the methods working in Haitian schools with Haitian children and teachers."
To date, Bucci has brought to Haiti nine faculty and seven graduate students from Ohio State and three retired teachers from Ohio. The team has developed and taught nine courses multiple times. Among the topics are mathematics teaching methods, reading theory, reading teaching methods, children's literature, and science education.
The courses are also taught to preservice and inservice teachers at the University of Notre Dame Haiti and the University Caraibe in Port-au-Prince, and research is developing with Haiti's Center for Research in Education, Formation, and Instruction (CREFI).
100% pass rates on the national sixth-grade test
Memorable moments of progress have engraved themselves in Bucci's memory. At one training session, she recalls that faculty and graduate students waited until the local teachers were on break, then rearranged the traditional rows of classroom benches from facing the teacher to facing each other.
"When the teachers came back, they looked shocked," Bucci says. "They had never seen seating arranged to promote discussion among students. We used the change to introduce them to questioning to promote critical thinking in students. We invited them to talk about how their teaching would change with the room arrangement."
On a later visit, Bucci was thrilled to see a first-grade teacher with her room's benches grouped in a circle so she could walk around and engage the students. "It may seem like a baby step compared to U.S. standards," Bucci says, "but for the Haitian teachers, the difference is huge."
Most exciting to everyone is the amazing change in the students. In 2008, both lab schools had 100 percent pass rates on the national sixth grade test, an impressive accomplishment.
Children's literature, video case studies, and Keep Books in Creole
Imagine a country with no books for children. The everyday language of Haiti is Creole; the business language is French. Few books for children exist in Haitian Creole, which impedes the development of reading and writing.
Cheryl Canada, an alumna of the college and director of the college's Mid-Ohio Writing Project in Mansfield, has traveled to Haiti as part of Bucci's team nine times in three years. Initially, she saw no significant writing being done by students or teachers. In response, she started to teach best practices in writing and literature-based instruction at the two laboratory schools.
Alumna Cheryl Canada (MEd '98, Education), director of the college's Mid-Ohio Writing Project, taught a three-day course on reading methods last December to inservice teachers at the University of Caraibe. The teachers came from Haiti's Saint-marc, Gonaïves, and Lagonave.
Canada is rewarded by success as well. For instance, she showed the preschool teachers how a patterned story like Brown Bear, Brown Bear uses repetition to teach content. She then invited the teachers to make their own patterned stories.
When Canada returned in December, one teacher was introducing occupations to her five-year-olds using the model. "Not only did she start writing herself, but she introduced the pattern and had the children fill in the blanks," Canada says. "She was writing collaboratively with the students. I was ecstatic."
Canada has made several presentations at conferences about writing instruction in a developing country. "Literature helps children develop critical thinking skills and important oral and written skills," she says. "It also engages them, which is a problem in Haiti's school system where 65 percent of children - of those fortunate enough to go to school to begin with - drop out as early as fifth grade. It's taken time to show I'm there to help, but now everyone is excited. The teachers are interested, very helpful, and very receptive."
Bucci hopes to create video vignettes of high-functioning Haitian teachers like those at the lab schools to share with other teachers throughout the country. The Video Case Studies Program will help motivate teachers since it's a credible means of sharing inventive and innovative methods of instruction.
Bucci and Associate Dean Charles Hancock, International Affairs and Diversity, are piloting the Haitian Creole Keep Books Project. Ohio State Keep Books, simple books for beginning readers, are being translated into Haitian Creole to be used in classrooms to teach reading and then sent home with children, thus increasing literacy in Haitian households. Nearly half the population is illiterate.
If Haiti is ever to break the cycle of poverty experienced by the majority of its citizens, best practices in education are essential. Bucci's long-term goal is to eliminate the need for outside assistance and to promote in-country sustainability.
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