INFOTEP creates history in San Andres

The Instituto de Formación Técnica Profesional(INFOTEP) is a community college who recently launched out it's Language and Culture Center.  

The center seeks to provide the necessary tools to prepare our students and community in the preservation of our native language, and in the knowledge and mastering of native, national and international languages while allowing them to be competitive in education and workforce and being active participants in the world's global communication process.




 This is the first time in the island and Country that an institution of higher education teaches our native Creole language. The community's response has been very positive and we have had many requests from different companies that need their employees to know the Creole language.

 We have also started a small research project geared towards the teaching of languages to children. Because of the winter break we have created a vacation language course through which we are observing cultural development as we study the children's responses to the different methods of teaching a language though content areas such as arts and crafts, sports and dance. In order to do this, we have created the following classes:
 

•  Basketball in Creole
•  Arts and Crafts in English
•  Healthy lifestyle in French
•  Martial Arts and Japanese vocabulary
•  Dance and Portuguese

 The course is three weeks long, and while we know that it may not be possible to acquire a language in such a short time, we are however just observing the responses to the different language acquisition methods. With this course we are also looking to expose our children to the different languages and to therefore explore the cultural richness that our world and community provides; you see, San Andres and Providence islands are touristic destinations where these languages interact. Having completed only one week of this program, children have already expressed their interest in continuing to learn a second language.