Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

News about the MIT-Haiti Initiative

In January, the 5th MIT-Haiti Workshop on Active Learning in STEM was held in Haiti. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Vijay Kumar (Senior Strategic Advisor, MIT Office of Digital Learning) and Professor Michel Degraff have been leading a team of MIT faculty and staff engaged in helping improve STEM education in Haiti through the use of open education resources and digital technology for active learning all in Haitian Creole. This is the first time ever that such resources and pedagogies are being produced and tested in Haitian Creole—Haiti’s national language—with the help of a valiant team of MIT educators and staff, alongside educators and administrators in Haiti. This 5th workshop was the most successful to date with some 80 participants, and it was co-hosted by Haiti’s Ministry of National Education.

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You can see more photos of the workshop here.

There’s also a moving video of a group of Haitian artists donating to the MIT-Haiti Initiative a fresco that they painted during the workshop.

The slides that Michel used to introduce the workshop are available on his Facebook page. There’s an English version of these slides for a keynote speech Michel gave on January 4, 2015, for a Haitian Independence Day gala in Randolph, Massachusetts.

And here’s an article, in French, about the workshop.