OUTCOMES OF SLAM WRITING WORKSHOPS FOR HAITIAN STUDENTS AT THE END OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

Abstract

"In Haiti, the success rate in elementary school remains very low and the majority of teachers do not have sufficient knowledge of effective pedagogical approaches to writing which leads to demotivation and a low sense of effectiveness as scriptwriters among students. We chose slam as a genre of contemporary and urban poetry (Vorger, 2011) and the workshop device to work on slam poetic writing (Troia, Lin, Cohen and Monroe, 2011), ideal to improve students' writing skills, motivation and sense of effectiveness. The research took place in two primary schools in Port-au-Prince against the backdrop of a socio-political crisis. Twelve facilitators (10 women and 2 men), trained in advance, facilitated the workshops in 13 sessions of 90 minutes each. A total of 61 students aged 12-13 participated in the after-school writing workshops (26 boys and 38 girls). Students completed a questionnaire on their motivation and sense of writing skills before and after the program. A corpus of 41 texts of claimed poetry written by students is the subject of a thematic and linguistic analysis. The results indicate that students benefit from their writing and oral expression skills, self-confidence and empowerment, and that their texts demonstrate a high degree of linguistic creativity and thematic richness. The positive results are consistent with those obtained in other socio-cultural contexts (Patmanathan, 2014) regarding the impact of the writing workshops. They contribute to new knowledge about slam poetry as an appropriate literary genre for young people, even at the end of primary school."