The late veteran educator, Professor Emerita Hazel Simmons McDonald, spent her career advocating for educational equity, particularly for children who were at risk of being left behind because of lack of fluency in English.
Simmons-McDonald, who passed away in June 2025, developed a pilot programme, using an introductory text as teaching school for speakers of French Creole in St Lucia. This was inspired by decades of research on the development of literacy by Creole and Creole Influenced Vernacular speakers and vernacular literacy within the formal context.
The former Principal of The UWI Open Campus (now The UWI Global Campus) earned her PhD in Applied Linguistics from Stanford University in 1988. For her thesis she examined the progress of children in St Lucia who spoke French Creole exclusively when they started school, and among the findings was that the children had not learned to use English for school purposes.
“What I found was that the children who entered school who spoke Creole as their first and dominant language ended up staying back a year in the first class, and then they stayed back another year. So from the very beginning they started falling back in the school system.
“And the approach to teaching them was they would just sit in the class, and they would listen to the teacher doing work with the other students, and when the teacher had time she would take them as a small group and have them do counting… but there was never really a focused approach to helping them learn English through communication purposes. And secondly, their own language was not promoted at all.”
This language barrier placed the students at a major disadvantage very early in their education journey, and often had lasting effects.
“They were deficient in terms of the purposes for which they were going to school and the objectives which the Ministry [of Education] had set, which was that they should come prepared for them to do the Common Entrance and then to go on to secondary school or go on to a vocational school. Most of them had to drop out of school and go into the community to work.”
Simmons-McDonald undertook further research in that area when she later joined the Faculty of Humanities and Education at The UWI Cave Hill Campus, and her work motivated her to develop a programme to assist the affected children.
“There were children the teachers identified [as having] disabilities, but when I spoke to the children, they were fluent in French Creole, they could talk about any subject. And the problem was they could not use English for school purposes. So I chose a sample of children and personally went back and forth when I had the time, from UWI to St Lucia, and I developed a programme to teach the children so they could become bilingual.
“We had sessions where we spoke in Creole, where they talked fluently about what they did, we discussed all sorts of things about life in the community, so they were learning to get some ease about discussing Creole, which hadn’t happened in school before. And in the other session what I would do [was] read to them stories in English and help them begin to talk about the stories in English, listening to good versions of the stories in English, and developing their own interpersonal communication skills in English as a first step towards learning English,” reflected the former head of the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature and former dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Education.
By the end of that research project, the children were reading and writing both French Creole and English, with some going on to successfully sit the Common Entrance Exam and entering secondary school.
“And that for me was a significant indicator of what is possible if we approach helping children to learn language in a way that really helps them to develop that cognitive flexibility and really helping them to become proficient and fluent in the two languages at their disposal,” she stated.
Simmons-McDonald pointed to what she believed is a more promising situation today, as steps have been taken in the ensuing years to give wider recognition to the Creole language.
The former president of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics has been collaborating with a team of prominent promoters of the Creole language to produce a series of four books for early learners, which would help to encourage the use of Creole in schools.
“In the last few years what I have done is to team up with Dame Pearlette Louisy (former Governor General of St Lucia) and Marietta Edwards (former Deputy Chief Education Officer of St Lucia) and we began to prepare some introductory texts for the children for use in Creole, that [will] teach them the phonology and so on, so early readers up to Grade 1, which is what we have,” Simmons-McDonald said.
She also advocated for the training of teachers in Creole if that project is to succeed.
“So you see, if you wanted to introduce them in the primary schools … you’d have trouble if you had teachers who could not speak it properly. So that’s why they’re introducing it as a pilot in select schools where you have a higher concentration of French Creole speakers. And the training is for teachers to be used in those schools to teach them the French Creole and the English bilingual approach to learning… to really establish the foundation for language learning, bilingualism, and then when they get to secondary school then you teach it as a subject like you teach French, Spanish and whatever else.”
Simmons-McDonald remained confident that a successful implementation of that project will result in greater cognitive flexibility of the young learners, and will facilitate the learning of a third language later in their education career.
Her passing brought a remarkable journey to a close, but her scholarship, programmes, and partnerships remain an enduring force in advancing inclusive education in St. Lucia and the wider Caribbean.
