Strong Beginnings: Developing the Whole Child

• In Event: Starting Early, Starting Strong: Pre-primary Education for All

Proposal

The Global Center for the Development of the Whole Child (GC-DWC) at the University of Notre Dame has been working to improve educational outcomes for vulnerable children in Haiti for over a decade. In the past 2 years, under a Global Development Alliance (Strong Beginning: Leveraging the home, school, and church to develop the whole child in Haiti) funded by USAID, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and Porticus, the GC-DWC and its partners in the Catholic Church have initiated programming at various levels of scale focused on pre-primary education.

The challenges posed by chronic disinvestment and disruption of core institutions in Haiti mean that a top-down approach to change will never directly reach the individuals most in need. Recognizing that each Catholic parish in Haiti runs a school and is deeply embedded in local culture and home life, GC-DWC Haiti activates parish networks to meet children’s holistic needs at all three levels of their social ecology: the home (lakay), school (lekòl), and church (legliz) or L3. Innovative interventions occur within the L3 system and include everything from integrating child development and positive parenting messages into sermons and baptismal preparation courses to introducing nutrition education and resources to combat stunting within schools to creating community resource centers for play and learning.

Iterative implementation, learning-while-doing, and careful gathering of the available evidence, through qualitative and/or quantitative assessments, is integral to the GC-DWC’s approach to pre-primary interventions in Haiti. This presentation will share learnings from several related but distinct Pre-K interventions in the North, South, and Grand’Anse Departments over the past 18 months. Building on a successful Socio-Emotional Learning program scaled in 1st and 2nd grade classrooms, the GC-DWC implemented a Pre-K SEL-focused Morning Meeting in 40 schools in Southern Haiti in the 2021-2022 school year, and evaluated this intervention through a randomized controlled trial using the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) tool. From 2021-2022, a more intensive Pre-K program was rolled out in 5 school communities in Northern Haiti, with one particular school receiving an intensive summer program and ongoing coaching throughout the school year. The GC-DWC will discuss the impact and learnings derived from each of these programming choices and how learning is being incorporated into future programs.

Author

• Kate Schuenke-Lucien, University of Notre Dame