Haiti educational training and leadership event: May 3-5

The next steps for our education capacity-building work in Haiti takes place this coming weekend in Cap-Haitien, Haiti. For the past three years, our team of Haitian and Canadian leaders has been providing professional development for more than 500 teachers in Haiti. We are now working alongside 30 Haitian instructional "champions" to prepare them for taking on increased responsibility in the Educator and Leadership Institute.

This coming weekend's version of the Educator and Leadership Institute will provide a high-level opportunity to identify with our Haitian partners how we will build on the successes of the past three years. The sustainability of ELI in Haiti is founded on a model where educators from the local context take on increasing authority for a peer-to-peer model of professional learning. Research I did last year in Egypt demonstrated that this form of professional learning is meaningful and authentic for participants (click here to read this article).

We will be leading workshops on leadership, andragogy (adult learning), assessment, and program planning. Throughout the weekend, we will continue to engage in research to identify the influence of the training on leadership development and how social change takes place in contexts such as Haiti.
Fundamental to this work is developing an understanding - from the perspective of our local partners - of how sustainable change can take place in Haiti.

We seek to listen and understand before determining a way forward: Reciprocity is fundamental to all that we do.

I will be working with three other Canadian educational leaders in the training weekend. We are fortunate to have received funding from a Canadian foundation (Gay Lea Foundation) which is supporting this training. Financial commitments from organizations like Wilfrid Laurier University and the Gay Lea Foundation - as well as many individual donors - enables change to take place. The training itself leads to a future where "seed funding" is not required. That is sustainability in action!

I think this is an amazing aspect of ELI:
Canadian and Haitian volunteers + Canadian charitable seed funding = social change