A new three-year partnership is helping teachers bring Matènwa’s child-centered, nonviolent approach to three schools in Port-au-Prince.
There was a different kind of energy on the MCLC campus recently: 36 teachers gathered in Matènwa for a week of training with our Institute for Learning.
They came as part of a new three-year partnership with Peace Project, which plans to incorporate Matènwa’s teaching methodologies into three schools in Port-au-Prince.
For the teachers, the week was about much more than learning a new set of classroom techniques. It was an opportunity to experience an approach to education that has been taking shape in Matènwa for decades—one built around learning in Haitian Creole, active student participation, nonviolence, dialogue, and respect for every child.
Learning by experiencing it
At Matènwa, teacher training is not simply a matter of sitting and listening to someone explain what good teaching should look like.
Teachers participate. They practice. They ask questions. They reflect together. And they experience the same kind of active, collaborative learning that they can then bring back to their own students.
That is at the heart of MCLC’s Institute for Learning: helping educators take ideas that have worked in Matènwa and adapt them for their own classrooms and communities.
From one school to many
MCLC began as one community school on Lagonav. But from the beginning, the hope has never been simply to create one exceptional place for children to learn.
Over the years, Matènwa educators have shared what they are learning with teachers and school leaders across Haiti. This new partnership with Peace Project is the latest chapter in that work.
Over the next three years, teachers from Peace Project’s three Port-au-Prince schools will continue working with the Institute for Learning as they put these approaches into practice.
That matters because the impact of a teacher reaches far beyond one training session—or even one school year. A teacher who creates a classroom where children are respected, encouraged to think, and able to learn in the language they understand best can influence hundreds of young lives over the course of a career.
Watch the video above to see the teachers learning, practicing, and sharing together in Matènwa.
