Chèche Konnen Center

The Chèche Konnen Center is dedicated to improving science education for children who are not currently succeeding in school, whose linguistic, intellectual and cultural strengths are not recognized as relevant to academic learning. These children are disproportionately from low-income families with limited formal education; many speak a first language other than English; and in the districts where we work many are of African descent.

Chèche Konnen means "search for knowledge" in Haitian Creole. The first teachers to collaborate with the Center gave it this name in 1987.

The Center conducts research on learning and teaching in urban classrooms and on teacher inquiry as a form of professional development. A cornerstone of this work is documentation of the sense-making resources that children from ethnically and linguistically diverse backgrounds bring to the study of science (e.g., the oral and literate traditions they command in their daily lives outside of school) and the ways these intersect with those characteristic of scientific disciplines. In line with this, the Center’s work is guided by the following principle: All children have a great deal to learn from one another. Those who typically do not excel in academic disciplines have as much to teach as do children who typically do excel.