This double issue of the Journal of Education and Development in The Caribbean (JEDIC) honours Jossett Lewis‐Smikle, lecturer in Literacy Studies in the School of Education, University of the West Indies, Mona, who passed away in March 2013. Many in our university community and beyond will know of her unstinting commitment to literacy achievement in Jamaica through her teaching, research, curriculum development and community work.

For Cuban (1992), fundamental reforms are those which permanently transform, alter, or completely overhaul the educational process, and are not mere renovations. Many changes have to take place for these reforms to materialize. Fullan (1993) describes educational change as “an overlapping series of dynamically complex phenomena” (p. 21) that are uncontrollable in many respects. Change is not something that can be forced or mandated, he argues.

This issue of the Journal of Education and Development in the Caribbean contains articles that use a variety of methodologies and span countries in both the English-speaking Caribbean and Latin America. The article by Garcia Pena, Da Silva, Angelucci and Csoban, in fact, compares youth in higher education in Latin America and the Caribbean. Two of the articles were originally presented at the Biennial Conference on Education held at the University of the West Indies on the St. Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago in 2013.

Based on the Language Experience and Awareness approach, the Literacy 1–2–3 (L1–2–3) was designed for use in the Language Arts Window in a constructivist teaching/learning environment in Jamaican primary schools. Based on a review of studies on L1–2–3, this paper examined the extent to which characteristics of the innovation, local characteristics, and external factors impacted the effectiveness of its implementation.

The aim of this study was to ascertain the root causes of absenteeism among children of the rural poor in one hundred Jamaican primary schools in which absenteeism was most problematic. The research utilized a mixed methods approach and involved transforming qualitative data into quantitative data and generating descriptive statistics. Focus group interviews were utilized to collect data from school and community members and involved 165 children, ranging in age from 7 to 12.

Words that come to mind in reading this book are global, contextual, innovative, and multidisciplinary. Globalization is typically defined as a set of processes involving interactions and networks within various domains (including the political and the cultural) and involving also “the accelerated movement of goods, services, capital, people and ideas across national borders”(Little and Green, 2009, p. 1).This seems to describe the processes used in the making of this book.

This special section focuses on the evaluation of national curriculum strategies which was commissioned by the Ministry of Education, Jamaica through The UWI Consulting Inc. (see Jennings-Craig et al., 2012). The focal points for the evaluation were Numeracy, Literacy/Language Arts and Spanish in primary schools, and English Language, Mathematics and Modern Languages (Spanish and French) in secondary schools.

This paper present case studies of distance education (DE) at two universities of the English-speaking Caribbean. It outlines the initation, development, implementation and outcomes of: (i) programmes offered by the Institute of Distance and Continuing Education of the University of Guyana and: (ii) the Certificate in Education offered by distance via the University of the West Indies Distance Education Experiment.