Everyday learning in Haiti: Towards transformative thinking about education

• In Event: Education in Haiti: Alternatives for Social Transformation

Proposal

Consideration of education in Haiti is often reduced to a focus on schooling. However, in this analysis I draw on a broader anthropological notion of education that focuses on children's learning in everyday contexts through participation in cultural practice (Lave, 1996; Gaskins & Paradise, 2010; Michel, 1996; Paradise & Rogoff , 2009; Rogoff et al, 2013). This education, which I term "self-education," exists in parallel (and some would say, in tension with) formal schooling and derives its strength and indeed flourishing from wellsprings of cultural practice, value, and meaning grounded in Haitian history and culture--resources that are vital to contemporary Haitian society but often ignored and obscured by the colonialist heritage of Haitian schooling. This is learning that is deeply egalitarian in that it resists social class determinism in favor of autonomous, embodied creativity and self-direction where egalitarian and future-oriented personhood is possible.
In this analysis I use findings from video-based ethnographic research on children's multimodal and embodied interactions in peer groups, alongside over a decade of observations of naturally occurring learning among disadvantaged children and youth in ordinary non-school based settings, to explore the cultural nature and processes of children's learning. Key findings from this project illustrate the ways children used their bodies to mediate connections between themselves and the material world; how they used forms of open attention to attend to their environments, and how their participation was shaped by connection to the larger sentient worlds of nature and spirituality. These findings suggest that a closer look at culturally grounded forms of attention, participation, and spirituality as important dimensions in learning offers an alternative way to conceptualize education as a process of recognizing and supporting the interconnectedness of the human with the sentient worlds around us.
The findings are also relevant to the reform of classroom learning and indeed offer a rich resource to explore potential transformations and alternatives in formal education that are more aligned with the cultural assets already present in children's everyday experiences. I suggest that recognizing the ways embodied, sentient worlds of nature and spirit infuse ordinary engagements with learning processes offer powerful resources for the development of personhood and for social transformation..

Author

• Diane M Hoffman, University of Virginia