23893: Re: (web) (John Engle) (What American Know-How Has To Learn article) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: John Engle <john@theexperiment.info>

What American Know-How Has to Learn

(What we have learned while working in the field of
education is relevant to anyone seeking to introduce
outside expertise into a foreign environment.)

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.


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