The question that guided this study is how we can support education in extraordinary situations, such as natural disasters or contextual contingencies, affecting educational institutions around the world? This research involved two elementary schools in Port-au-Prince, during a socio-political crisis. In Haiti, the success rate in elementary school remains very low, and most teachers lack effective pedagogical approaches to writing, leading to demotivation and a low sense of efficacy as scriptwriters among pupils. We chose slam as a genre of both contemporary and urban poetry (Vorger, 2011) and the workshop device for working on slam poetry writing (Troia, Lin, Cohen and Monroe, 2011), ideal for improving students' writing skills, motivation and sense of efficacy. Twelve teachers led the workshops over 13 sessions of 90 minutes each. A total of 61 students aged 12 to 13 attended the after-school writing workshops. Students filled out a pre- and post-program survey on motivation and perceived writing effectiveness (Boultif, 2017). A corpus of 41 poetic texts written by the students was analyzed thematically. The teachers responded to an exit survey following the workshops. Results indicate that students benefit from their writing and speaking skills, self-confidence, and autonomy. Their texts demonstrate creative and thematic richness. The findings are consistent with those obtained in other socio-cultural contexts (Patmanathan, 2014) regarding the effect of writing workshops. Our findings contribute to the new knowledge about poetry workshops as an appropriate pedagogy for late elementary school in extraordinarily challenging situations.

Authors:
Amal Boultif, Ottawa University, Canada
Chantal Ouellet, University of Québec, Canada

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Amal Boultif is a teaching professor in the faculty of éducation in Ottawa University. She is currently working on new approaches in teaching language including multimodality and gamification.

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