#04 / new visions in conversation with Nedgine Paul Deroly
Anseye Pou Ayiti is a new generation of Haitian civic leaders modeling transformational leadership and advocating for excellence in education for all children. One of the people being behind this cultural revolution is Nedgine Paul Deroly - a woman that I totally admire, for her courage to speak the truth to power, for her clarity and commitment to social justice, and for how she shows up in the world. Feel invited to dive deep into our conversation.
AB: So we start these conversations with a simple question: what comes to your mind when you hear the word “leadership”?
NPD: When I think of the word “leadership”, I immediately think of a group. Funny enough, I didn't necessarily grow up thinking about it, because I think what's been normalized is thinking of THE leader in leadership, the person. But I don't think leadership exists unless there is some kind of collective mobilization towards something. And I also think about how a leader can act differently than the boss, in Creole, we use the word “chèf.” I think of a leader as somebody who pushes against existing paradigms and things that have been imposed as normal, as status quo, to do things differently, for the greater good and for mutual advancement.
AB: That's already so dense with meanings. I would like to stop for a while with this collective aspect of leadership because that's part of the work that we'd love to explore deeper. What do you mean, when you talk about collectivity and collective leadership? Do you see any concrete practices to make it visible?
NPD: I think of the ways in which a lot of societies and cultures used to consider "we" rather than "me", and I think about what changed, and what pushed us to think that the egocentric, the "I" focused, is okay. That then helped me understand what it might take to move us back in the other direction again. So in thinking about the community.
I tried to think about the ways in which we could revalue and reprioritize, but also make it very concrete, the benefits that come with thinking about "we" first and "us" first. I think that's a little bit of the charge, and the weight of the work that many social entrepreneurs, like us, do. Trying to help people see some of the things that might take a long time to manifest.
So when you think about global collective health, and having everyone take responsibility for their actions, for example, in the middle of a pandemic: what you do individually has an impact on global health. But it's hard to think about the benefits for people a few weeks from now or a few months from now. So I think one of the things we need to do differently when we think about the collective leadership and collective well-being is how do we make real today the positive impacts of “we” behavior for the collective. Even if it might take a long time to become real.
AB: Yeah, totally. I'm thinking about the current situation and the pandemic. Our neighbor lately, a really kind woman, was telling us “if you need something, whatever, just let me know. Even toilet paper - we have so much to share!”(laughs)
NPD: Yes - and what makes somebody have that instinct to say, “I'm going to share and not hoard.” And I think people sometimes reduce it to how you were brought up, or your values in your home, or how your parents or other members of your community helped you understand something. But I think it's more than that. I think there are different signals that we get from the media: from the way the news is delivered these days, the way our entertainment is delivered, there's just so much I think that signals to us that we should care about "I" first, "me" first. I would be interested in even just doing a little bit of dissection of figuring out what leads people to be collectivistic, even when everyone tells them not to be.
AB: Yes, even if you're brought up believing that that's the only path that you have to go forward. And how it's also connected to the Western mindset.
NPD: One hundred percent! And the idea that it's been exported to be "the normal". So now even when you think about maybe some Asian cultures, I don't know them very well, but I tend to think of their cultures as more collectivistic. It's so interesting that it seems out of the norm in the popular media. People would say “Oh my gosh, look at how different it is. Look at how Chinese classrooms work? How kids collectively cleaned up?” Why is that so amazing rather than saying this is the norm, everything else is a deviation from the norm.
AB: I was lately thinking about that also in the frame of, you know how some people address us saying, “Wow, that's so great that your work is meaningful, and in social service”. And I'm like, why is it not the norm?! Why do we agree on something less than that? Why do we agree with doing the work that is not of service?
NPD: Yes, that's exactly it. When do some things become unquestioned? Why did it become unquestioned for leadership to be about the "I" and even entrepreneurship to a certain extent is getting very "I" focused, which is always very concerning to me. Even social entrepreneurship, for some strange reason, has become very egocentric. And so I think we have to also wonder, what is it about modern psychology that makes people unquestioned what the status quo has been?
AB: I see that there's a lot of focus on investing in “you” in social entrepreneurship. And I'm really curious to hear about your strategies to collectivise your leadership?
NPD: One for us was about how we got from "we" to "I" in Haitian culture. We had to go through a period of identifying the traumas that led to that. Identifying that together has had people have "aha" moments - moments of a revelation by themselves. So I can't tell Stephanie, I can't tell Michelle when it started to become okay in her head for the focus to be on her instead of on the community. But when we go through the process of identifying traumas collectively, like: what was your first day of school memory? What was the moment where you realized that there's trauma in the classroom? What was the moment when you realized our mother tongue, Kreyòl, is not acceptable, but we have to speak French?
All of those moments are part of the trauma experience, so identifying them collectively, but never saying, this is the way trauma happens, allowing everyone to have their own healing moment, is part of that. Because I don't think you can build on really, really destroyed Earth, right? So we have to heal that Earth and try to figure out how to make that soil healthy again. And then from there, we start to build the collective.
By building the collective, one of the things that we realized is powerful for us is our culture. Actually using our culture: using proverbs using music, using games, folklore, oral histories, because there's so much of our culture that has been repressed, in order to satisfy the status quo of I, I, I. So what we do in our work - we literally have storytelling time. We'll recreate some games that we were told, that once you hit five years old, you can't play this anymore. We tried to just tap into some of the cultural aspects, such as: I can't win if we don't win this game. The only way you can win a game is if everybody wins. The only way you can tell some folk stories in Haitian culture is if everybody has a piece to play. So if one person is not in the circle, the full story is not told. The way we sing songs: you can't sing songs with one voice. There are no solos in some Haitian songs, it's groups. I think the ways in which we revalue and recenter our culture is the ways in which collective norms start to become normal.
The other piece of it too is bringing in the maximum of people who look and feel different. So what we realize is: our work cannot just be about teachers. Students have to be part of it. Parents are now part of our work. School directors are part of our work, our neighbors. I think the more we start to visually, literally see a manifestation of diversity, the easier it becomes to see the benefits of working in the collective.
The last piece is the data. I don't start with the data, but I think data is helpful, because like I said before - if the benefits are not quantitative to a certain extent, and clear, it's hard for some people to understand it. So five years ago, people were saying our work would be crazy and imaginary and fluffy. Now we have the data to back up some of the ways in which things are transformed quantitatively. And honestly, sometimes you have to define what you're quantifying. Sometimes I had to redefine it. I'm not going to use your measures, your definition of what success means. But here's what success looks like for us. And we're going to track it over time. But I'm not going to adopt your definition of success just to make you happy.
AB: I admire you for your courage and clarity and the way you do your work in such an unapologetic, and brave way. I am really curious to hear about your path: where did you collect the strength from, or which were the moments that were transformative for you and made it clear for you that this is the way you want to do your work?
NPD: It's interesting, I don't know if you've had this experience, but I'm realizing more and more that there are people who helped unlock these ideas within me in ways that I didn't recognize them. I remember in primary school, I had this teacher who was so strict. But I'm realizing there are some things I do, that are part of being unapologetic, that all kids can succeed, and that's what she wanted us to understand. But at 12 years old, you don't get it. You just don't like the strict teacher. She was saying, “You all don't believe what others are telling you you are capable of. Here is my bar and I'm not negotiating with that bar of excellence. You can get there!”. And we did. And I'm realizing that some things I do are like Madame Salomon. (laughs) It's crazy. So anyway, there's a lot of people and moments like that. A lot of it is shaped by people around me, which is another vote for the collectivistic way, of being raised and being introduced to other stimuli outside of the status quo.
So one, definitely my parents. When we moved to the US, they still said “Haitian culture will come alive in our home and don't let anybody be ignorant enough to make you feel bad about being an immigrant”. So all of that was also part of our upbringing. It was about being proud instead of ashamed or fearful of talking about our identity.
Number two, was this push that Haitian identity was misunderstood. When we moved outside of Haiti there was a lot of stuff associated with Haitian identity, including the incorrect claim that AIDS came from Haiti. There was all this craziness that was all false. I'm grateful that in a push to inform the ignorant, I started to realize that even if you're getting messages from the "powerful", those images could be false. That motivated me to want to uncover how much is false, how much is pushed as a narrative without truth. I think that's what, after my parents, encouraged me to study history. I majored in history in university and I think that also helped me understand how powerful history is. But it's their history, it's not our history, and it's not messy or complex enough to capture the full truth of any people in any community in any country.
The third piece of why I think I push against the status quo is that I have been in the presence of and worked with, and lived in communities where I have seen genius die and I am terrified of how generations are losing genius because they're trying to conform to something that was created generations ago by a couple of people in two countries. I think it's ridiculous. And I'm terrified that things like capitalism and the ways in which Western hegemony has just swept across the globe remain in fact unquestioned. So I am excited about the genius that will be unleashed in the coming years if we even give it a chance to flourish.
AB: Your work is strongly related to challenging present colonial reality. How do you deal with topics of decolonization in your work?
NPD: I was just on a call the other day where I was like “we have to decolonize our education system”. I think the clarity of words is helpful. And, honestly, I wasn't necessarily this way, 10 years ago. I would try to tell everyone, let's talk about this for a while until I dropped this word. But I realized that while they'll forget the 50 words you use to describe decolonization, they're gonna remember decolonization. They're gonna remember that one word.
So I've been encouraged and I'm working towards being even more succinct and concise with the words even when they're labeled controversial. Because you will feel something when I say “decolonize”. And usually, that gut reaction is because you know, it comes from a place of truth. We got to use the words and I worry that the culture of fear that is being stoked in all parts of the world these days, is so that we get away from the very clear: this is truth. That is false. This is colonialism. This is capitalism. We have to use the words and I think, the more we do it together, the more it becomes normal to be on the stage in a big, big conference, maybe, and use words that otherwise maybe just be said in private groups.
AB: When we talk about learning and decolonizing curriculum what are your practices to implement it? What are your strategies or tactics to approach the topics of decolonization in education?
NPD: What's tricky is that some of the curriculum is very centralized. That's one piece. A couple of the other strategies. One is creating other content, replace what exists. We partner with a couple of other groups and people who've literally been saying: This is why we've been teaching history because it is, again, coming from the colonizers’ point of view. Here's our history, which sometimes only existed in oral ways and oral traditions and in music and in culture. But now we're going to actually write it down because sometimes, unfortunately, if it's not written, it's not seen as valid (which is a whole other debate and a whole other problem). But I think that's also important to have the content that says: I'm not just imagining what is art and what is truthful. Here it is. And let me share it more.
The second piece is being really clear about where the content comes from. In our pedagogical work, I think it's even unquestioned, who are the book publishers and distributors? Who is creating what we absorb and digest? So another piece of what we had to do - to say that a lot of these book publishers are from Europe, a lot of them are from Canada and the US. What about the homegrown publishers who were never given a chance to produce the content that could come for the Haitian Ministry of Education?
And then the last thing I wanted to mention is the pedagogical techniques. I'm sure you can relate to this. Even if I have a questionable curriculum in front of me in a book, we want our students to be able to ask questions. Because the content will never be perfect. So one of the things we push for on the part of teachers and students and parents is - can we shift the competencies and the skills that make you ask critical questions, that even if 20 years from now, we're still struggling with content that is biased, you have got enough of that muscle to ask questions, so you don't unquestioningly accept what you're reading? I think that muscle actually might be even more important than what's written on the page.
AB: Building on all that has been said - what lies at the center of your work? What is the core or what are the most important values in the work that you're doing? And how do we know that there are these ones?
NPD: One is liberation. And I know liberation is important because I cannot define what a classroom of 40 kids can do. Once I started defining what that will look like, I'm not really working towards liberation. So liberation is a big piece for me. Back to my point about the genius that is existing and just needs to be released and allowed to live. The other value for me is equity. And equity is a step towards liberation. It is about redistributing the resources, redistributing the capital, and doing it in a way that is so intentional, and so unapologetic, that it might make people uncomfortable. We get to that point because we're so comfortable with the status quo, and we can't envision something different. So unless we're pushing against something and the resistance is created, we're not truly redistributing things. And then there is one other thing: joy. And I think it goes with liberation and equity. I worry sometimes liberation and equity are seen as fight, war, division, conflict, tension, and all those charged words. Joy is also just something that when you see some of the content of our kids, and you see some of the imagery that we share about APA (Anseye Pou Ayiti). It's not just for branding. It's literally who we are! Because if we don't lead from a place of "we are joyful, we deserve to be in the light, we deserve to be happy, we deserve to be able to live into our full humanity”, I also worry that the work we do every day as social entrepreneurs, you and I both, is going to be clouded with the sense of always showing a negative, always being so heavy. You know that's not who we are! And that's not what we want to do! You choose to label our work as negative and conflict-ridden and no, it's not. I want to put joy out there because I don't know if we talked about that enough.
AB: Thank you for this! I know we were talking about joy and I also know that we are having this conversation right now because of the concerns that we share about how our world is led now and how many things concern us. And finding our way through this. What are the issues that concern you the most currently, about the world we are living in? What is this that you find the most difficult?
NPD: One, I think we're becoming very cynical about how deeply entrenched some of the inequitable power structures and capitalistic and colonial structures are. I often get the question: what's hardest in your journey? What's been hardest for you, as you've co-founded this movement. And I always start with cynicism. I feel like it's getting deeper these days. And that concerns me.
AB: How does it manifest, this cynicism?
NPD: The cynicism manifests in questions about the impossibility of our goal, about the fact that you're talking about a deep, generations-old system that is so powerful. Hearing: Don't attack the system. Just go for a piece. Tell me what piece specifically you'd be happy with resolving?” It narrows our vision because it seems like the goal is too big. So the questions, the lack of funding, to be honest, is tied to the cynicism. It's like, "Nah, that's not what I meant. That's not what I'm really interested in". The lack of funding and how hard it is for funding to come to us. I think it also manifests in the ways in which people are untrusting and doubtful of the proof we share. It’s always like: “Oh, that's a special case”. “Those kids are special”. Or “you got a few good leaders together, but that's not representative of the bigger country”. So there's that doubt that what you're sharing is true.
The other thing that concerns me is the ways in which the Maslow hierarchy of needs work - as much as we are pushing forward and achieving certain levels of success when it comes to our work, the economic livelihood, the ability to survive, and to be not worried about where your meal will come from next, or to be unemployed, because almost 70% of our people are unemployed in Haiti - that real economic zero safety net is something that is bothering me. That is hard because I would never push to talk about instructional excellence in front of teachers who are hungry. That's unfair and disrespectful.
The third one is: the ways in which I think the move to get automated and the power of technology and all of that is exciting, but I worry it is putting a lot of stress on people-centered movements. And making it seem as if our work is not "the right way to move". Because look at how technology can make your work easier, faster, better, shinier, sexier... So I worry a little bit about people-centered movements that are just not considered “sexy” now.
AB: In the light of the current geopolitical situation how do you cultivate hope? Or where do you find hope in your everyday, in your practice? And what's the role of hope in your work?
NPD: For me, our ancestry is not something of the past. There's a lot in our culture that says the past can never be forgotten, because it helps you go forward. We don't think of the past as dates, like our revolution was 1804. No, the date is more than the date, and so is our ancestry. The very concrete examples of how we've always been powerful, not past tense, how we've always been powerful are ways that create hope for me. The other thing that gives me hope is working with kids. I don't know what it would look like for me to only work with adults because that would be a little bit of a drain on my spirit. Kids see the world with a different set of eyes. So kids! And I also think part of what we were saying before about joy. The more we have light in our spirit and light in the ways in which we kind of see the world and move in the world. And part of that light comes from healing and comes from the rest, and not feeling like we have to be on this constant wheel of productivity. I don't think I can be joyful if I'm tired. I don't think I can be joyful if I'm having difficult conversations only. Every day. And I think part of that also comes with hope.
AB: What's the biggest lesson or piece of advice that you would be willing to share with the people that would like to embrace the leading that has a chance to transform the paradigm we function in right now?
NPD: Know who you are, and remember who you are. It's a piece of advice that I got almost 10 years ago from a family member who knew I was moving back home: to Haiti, and I didn't quite understand the layers of that advice until after.
When I say “know who you are, remember who you are” I think you have to do a lot of identity work before you can help others change and understand their identity. I find it very harmful and even dangerous for people who are involved in trying to… You can fill in the blank. There's a lot of people who try to do good with good intentions but are broken themselves, they're hurting other people.
So we have to be careful about that. That's one: know yourself. Remember who you are, because I think there's a lot of assaults, on identity and on people, when you're trying to push against the status quo. And when you start to feel yourself shaking, and you don't understand how to go deep into your roots, you might fall down. Fall down more than physically. Fall down spiritually, fall down emotionally and psychologically. And that's advice that I would encourage everybody to consider.
AB: Talking about being and our roots, what's the role of spirituality, in your practice, and on a personal level, but then also on an organizational level?
NPD: I am the daughter of an Episcopal priest, and I was raised in the Christian faith. What I'm grateful for is that church for me was always lowercase C. It wasn't the institution. And it's funny because I'm the daughter of a priest. My dad and my mom were literally saying: “our faith is not how many verses you can memorize and what prayers you can memorize, but rather it is respect, it is justice, and it is love. And if those three things can be part of who you are, you are a Christian person”. And I'm always confused by people who are like trying to test people for their Christian level of understanding and whatever. But that's not my Christian faith. I say that because my parents shaped how I see my faith, and I think it's translated in the way I want to do my work. So we have people of all walks of faith, we have a lot of different faith walks in our work. I love that. When I believe to be core to my personal understanding of faith is what is translated in our work too, which is justice and love and respect. The other spiritual piece is: I think a lot of what is spiritual is about being centered. And that's why I love talking and learning more about trauma-informed pedagogy, and equity-informed pedagogy. I believe a lot of the piece about healing is about spirituality, unconnected to religion. It’s about: is your spirit okay? When I ask you, how are you? Can you give me an honest answer, or do you think you have to automatically say “I'm okay, I'm good”?
AB: And as we both know that our work can feel draining and exhausting. As you said, sometimes people think that it's just these difficult and uncomfortable things. The last thing that I would like to ask you is: would you be willing to share one grounding practice that helps you stay in balance? What do you do to take care of yourself spiritually, emotionally, and physically?
NPD: I am not good at it (laughs). I believe in it and honestly, it is one of the biggest things I need to keep working on. One thing that I recognize about myself is that healing and centering practices that worked for me five years ago are no longer necessarily the right ones for me today. It evolves and it is dynamic. One for me has always been music: knowing what artist, what type of music to listen to that is not background music, but literally giving myself space to center myself with another type of sensory experience. Because I don’t deal with music and musicians, but it might be any other day that I need to have that undivided focus on music that restores me. And it can’t be music about education! It needs to be something different. I need music just about happy things and something that is different from work. Even reading - it is harder for me now to read fiction and I need to get back to that practice, but I find myself reading things only about our movement and our political and cultural work and I think it is important also to balance that.