News Information

• NEWS_POSTED_BY: Haiti Place
• NEWS_POSTED_ON: Aug 08, 2015
• Views : 807
• Category : Diaspora News
• Description : MIT News
  
  Initiative designed to help Haitians gain technical education.
  
  Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office
  April 17, 2013
  
  From left to right: Director of MIT's Office of Educational Innovation and Technology Vijay Kumar, MIT Provost Chris Kaiser, Haiti Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe, MIT Linguistics Professor Michel DeGraff and Haiti Minister of National Education and Vocational Training Vanneur Pierre at the signing of a joint commitment to an initiative for digital learning in Kreyòl.
  
  Photo: Dominick Reuter
• Location : Massachusetts, United States
• Website : http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2013/mit-haiti-initiative-0417

Overview

• MIT and Haiti signed a new joint initiative today to promote Kreyòl-language education in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines, part of an effort to help Haitians learn in the language most of them speak at home.
  
  “This government will make every effort to make this initiative a big success,” Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe said at the signing ceremony in MIT’s Vannevar Bush Room. “Haiti is moving forward.”
  
  The project is taking MIT-developed and technologically based open education resources, translating those materials into Kreyòl, disseminating them in Haiti, and evaluating the materials’ effectiveness. The work is being done in conjunction with professors and educators from a variety of institutions in Haiti, including the State University of Haiti, Université Caraïbe, École Supérieure d’Infotronique d’Haïti, Université Quisqueya, NATCOM and the Foundation for Knowledge and Liberty.
  
  “MIT folks are very collaborative,” MIT Provost Chris Kaiser said at the event. The initiative, he added, represented MIT’s “desire to do good in the world.”
  
  The idea that more Haitian education should occur in Kreyòl is a longtime belief of MIT linguistics professor Michel DeGraff, a native of Haiti, who has contended that Kreyòl has been improperly marginalized in the Haitian classroom. DeGraff’s extensive research on public perceptions of Kreyòl, and on the language itself, has led him to assert that its perception as a kind of exceptionally simplified hybrid tongue, in comparison to English or French, unfairly diminishes the language.
  
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