In Haiti, the second-most-populous Caribbean nation, this beautiful building is in honor of Sonny Wang. The Sonny Wang Building has classroom space for 135 kids and the second level to be used for Worship space for over 100 people!
Today “the Sonny Wang Kindergarten building” comes to our world as Kreyòl-based digital tools are entering classrooms to improve science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in Haiti. Historically, Haitian children have been educated exclusively in French, a language in which most of the population are not fluent. Using Kreyòl for Haitian education will provide Haiti children quality access for STEM education.
While Haiti children feel most comfortable with Kreyòl, the use of French in Haiti’s classrooms has been a national education policy. School exams as well as national assessment tests are mostly conducted in French, rather than Kreyòl. STEM course materials have been available exclusively in French too. In Haiti’s classrooms, most children do not like to ask or answer questions since they are constantly struggling to translate from Kreyòl into French or from French into Kreyòl.
The use of French creates problems for teachers as well. Haiti’s teachers prefer to teach in Kreyòl because that’s the language that they feel most comfortable with also. They like to make jokes when I teach. That humor is essential for good teaching — to wake the students up, to keep them alert, and to make them feel relaxed.
Now the work of pro-Kreyòl educators both in Haiti and in the Haitian diaspora starts to show the key benefits of a Kreyòl-based education at all levels of the education system. Earlier this year, Haiti adopted a new educational policy that will allow students to be educated in Kreyòl, which is as capable of conveying complicated intellectual concepts as any other Indo-European tongue.
Kreyòl-based digital tools meet crucial needs in Haiti by introducing modern techniques for interactive pedagogy while helping to develop digital resources in Kreyòl. Digital tools including STAR, Mathlets, and PhET have been translated into Kreyòl and provide proof of concept of Kreyòl as a necessary ingredient for active learning in Haiti.
The initiative of using Kreyòl-based digital tools will have a profound impact on the way people think about teaching STEM in mother tongues, and serve as a very important model for similar initiatives around the globe. Across large swaths of Africa and the Americas, indigenous languages continue to face systematic marginalization. This new initiative provides a guide for these populations to empower their children with engineering tools to mitigate risk and uncertainty in STEM education.
Tonight, on the bank of the Grand River, Lisa and I read about I read about Sonny Wang’s Kindergarten classrooms, where beautiful engineering dreams will start.
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