41st Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award (2015)
Michel DeGraff, Faculty Award
Professor of Linguistics Michel DeGraff was honored with a faculty MLK Leadership Award for his innovative study of the value of native-language instruction in Haiti’s schools.
“When I was growing up, in a middle-class family and in my school, Creole wasn’t viewed as a real language,” says DeGraff, a founding member of Haiti’s newly created Haitian Creole Academy (Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen). “It was a given that you could only be successful in French.”
Over the years, many observers have disparaged Haitian Creole as a primitive tongue incapable of expressing complex concepts, while linguists have generally asserted that it is descended from a pidgin language. DeGraff emphatically disputes this. He has spent years presenting evidence that Haitian Creole is just as sophisticated as other languages, publishing papers in journals such as Language, Language in Society, Linguistic Anthropology and Linguistic Typology.
DeGraff’s research on Creole has only reinforced his hands-on interest in education. In connection with a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, he is working with a school in a remote mountain village on Haiti’s La Gonave island to test Creole-language instruction among fourth graders. The project uses computer programs to teach math in Creole, while avoiding the practice of rote memorization that often accompanies French-language teaching.
You can also read Michel’s comments on the MIT Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Award in the Faculty Newsletter.