Reading the Word and the World in Haiti: Literacy Education for Social Justice

Abstract

The first author traveled to Haiti as a member of a group of volunteers from the U.S. whose goals were to provide assistance to children in a privately operated primary school located in the rural community of Lamardelle.  For the first author, assistance primarily focused on training in literacy education, with an emphasis on reading comprehension strategies for students who struggle to read.  We examine literacy education as a tool of social justice.  This paper describes the components of the first summer of this teacher development program and explains how our work was undergirded by the Freirean ideas regarding liberatory education (Frire,2000). A second aim is to analyze ways language impacts the practice of education in Haiti.  In so doing we hope to present a model of how literacy education can be a tool for social justice in similar contexts.