Big up ya own self! a.k.a. blow your own trumpet

"It is important that we treat the Caribbean as a region moving on the basis of greater cohesion and greater cross fertilisation…and certainly I would stress the importance of regional integration in the way forward."

This week, I present an important caveat in the series. It is important that in reading this blog you understand that I am not proposing the Caribbean has it all together, as a matter of fact, we are susceptible to challenges such as neocolonialism that the UK is not. Todays' discussion will highlight some of these challenges by looking at the continued impact of colonialism on education, specifically through the work of Elaine Lam on the limitations of sharing of good practice in education accross the islands.

While most of the Caribbean has become independent from colonial powers, "there remain remnants of a colonial gaze towards the ‘centre’. On one hand, there is a desire for the island states to succeed on their own; on the other hand, there is the reality of vulnerability to greater powers. Ceding to the ‘centre’ often means ensuring standards are kept with the ‘rest of the world’...Education is directly affected by this phenomenon. Ruled by the local colonial bourgeois, ‘(e)lites in the (S)outh remain irresolute in their determination that education continues in its traditional way to sort people into eligibility for entry into elite ranks’ (Jones 2007, 334). This may include a separation of society by class and education achievement. The persistence of the 11+ exam and national scholarships for international higher education may be viewed as two key gates."

"Ideas from outside the region, however, may be viewed as welcome due to the notion of legitimisation. Steiner‐Khamsi (2004) builds on Schriewer’s (1990 in Steiner‐Khamsi 2004) work on externalisation in which he recognises that ‘international standards’ may be from an ‘imagined’ international community to legitimise policies. Steiner‐Khamsi (2004, 204) thus suggests that referring to foreign models helps to substantiate home education reforms: ‘the raison d’être for externalisation is the existence of a legitimacy crisis in an educational system’. The use of foreign ideas, such as the New Zealand and Canadian education systems in Trinidad and Tobago, as well as the reliance of CXC and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE) content on UK curriculum, may stem from the need to justify choices at the national level."

"Examples from another country become a resource for politicians to ‘demonstrate that desirable reforms are workable as well as right’ (Whitty and Edwards 1998, 223)." Interestingly, there is a wealth of research that shows these whole scale copy-cat programmes for education never work.

In her study, Lam's findings suggested "that respondents at the policy development level seemed more interested in participating on a global scale rather than a regional level. Initiatives occurring in neighbouring islands may be simply deemed irrelevant. Rather, there is a desire to be ‘global’ rather than ‘regional’ due to structural constraints of the knowledge economy and historical relationships with colonial powers. When asked about the place of Caribbean knowledge in curricula, one respondent replied:

'We may try that approach then find ourselves limited and the quality limited and unable to produce that kind of students who can make it on a global market'."

"In Hickling‐Hudson’s (2004, 295) vision of the ideal Caribbean society by 2050, she states that the present society is ‘trapped in the language and isolationist education traditions of the former colonizing powers’. The neo‐colonial trend of deferring to the metropole appears to be evident in Caribbean societies, distracting islands from developing national reforms to indigenise education and liberalise stifling colonial practices."

Lesson: While there is a lot of activism for Black students in HE, there is still a cultural confusion that exists, especially among Black Brits that leave us conflicted between our colonial past (what we can recognise), and our beautiful Black present. It is important that in the curriculum, we teach our Black students that what we have is good enough. The need to legitimise our experiences, needs, and learning by Western standards is a colonial hand-me down that we must shake. Teachers should support students in engaging in research and critical thought that in some cases has no coneptual or theoretical basis. Students should not settle for support that only centers the Western views and "official knowledge".

"It is important that we treat the Caribbean as a region moving on the basis of greater cohesion and greater cross fertilisation…and certainly I would stress the importance of regional integration in the way forward...The power of foreign models in creating a ‘consensus’ that a reform idea is successful loses its power during the process of transfer. It occurs exactly when ideas begin to develop and become nationalized as they ‘must confront cultural beliefs, practices, and local understandings; then the international argument loses weight’ (Spreen 2004b, 112)."

Lam, E. (2010). Sharing best practices in Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago: patterns of policy implementation and resistance. A Journal of Comparative and International Education. 41(1), pp. 25-41.

Full article can be found here