Creolist Michel Degraff: A Profile of Commitment, Advocacy, Excellence, and Hope

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Creolist Michel DeGraff needs no introduction to the readership of the Journal of Haitian Studies as he serves on its editorial board. Every reader knows that he is one of the handful of Haitian professors who has the distinct honor of being tenured at one of the most prestigious universities in the United States or in the world for that matter: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). While Michel is known for his university affiliation, he is equally known for his field of scholarship, which is primarily Creole Linguistics, as well as for his advocacy for Haitian Creole, which he has argued time and time again is a language just as sophisticated as any other. In fact, Michel’s entire academic life has been devoted to bringing Haitian Creole to the ranks of respected languages, and to bringing it to the fore of the Haitian educational system. His tireless efforts of the past twenty years culminated in the Fall of 2012 with the award of a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to introduce on-line Creole materials in the teaching of STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Michel’s project titled “Kreyol-based Cyberlearning for a New Perspective on the Teaching of STEM in Local Languages” is also intended to expand and deepen teachers’ expertise in what he refers to as “technology-enabled-active learning pedagogies.” It is expected that recently trained teachers will subsequently pass along their knowledge to increasing numbers of students, as well as to a new generation of teachers. Michel’s ultimate objective is that those efforts will lead to “an expanding library of locally grown Open Education Resources in Kreyol,” as Haitian educators and students “have had too little access to advanced content in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” He strongly believes that efforts undertaken from inside Haiti will give the project a much better chance at sustainability than if they were developed from the outside the country alone.In Fall 2012, Michel DeGraff added the most outstanding distinction to an already impressive academic record: He is a one-of-a-kind scholar who has the unsurpassed recognition of having received $1 million to make Haitian Creole a million-dollar language; thus silencing forever the views that only the languages of the previous colonial powers are “real” languages, worthy of study, worthy of support, and worthy of access to the educational domain. In his proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation, Michel forcefully argues “Better science, technology, engineering, and math education in under-developed countries will lead to better economic development.” Moreover, there is absolutely no doubt in his mind that education in the native language of the population “will qualitatively and transformationally improve learning.”When one looks at Michel’s academic career, it cannot be entirely surprising that he would tirelessly endeavor to find the means, a million dollars in this instance, necessary to formalize Creole teaching in Haiti’s schools, and to transform higher education. Michel’s academic life began in the late 1980s, when he enrolled in the doctoral program in computational linguistics at the prestigious University of Pennsylvania. Michel tells me that he owes it to Mitch Marcus that he first seriously thought about getting a PhD. Mitch Marcus is a computational linguist whom Michel first met when they worked together at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Subsequently, Mitch Marcus became his thesis advisor at the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, Michel also had the privilege to work with authoritative syntacticians and sociolinguists such as Tony Kroch, well known for his work on the history of English; Gillian Sankoff, well known for her work on Pidgins and Creoles and on language variation; and William Labov, considered the father of the field of “variationist sociolinguistics,” and perhaps the leading expert on African-American Vernacular English.