In this paper I advocate a critical reorientation of the way we think about the practice of teacher education in Jamaica. I suggest this as a strategy for challenging the resilience of traditional, teacher-centred pedagogy in our schools. To make my case I share the findings of a study that used the theoretical discourse of critical pedagogy as a conceptual framework to examine teaching practices in a Jamaican teachers college.

As global concerns increase about the effectiveness of schools in edu Tlcating and developing the human resource potential critical to economic and social advancement, countries worldwide have embarked on a wide range of school improvement initiatives. Central to these is the belief that good teachers are the most critical component of what schools need to do a good job, and good teachers need to benefit from good education programmes (Villegas-Reimers and Reimers 2000).

Stakeholder involvement in curriculum reform is one component of decentralization in the education system. Decentralization manifests itself in various forms, but the general notion is that it refers to the transfer or sharing of authority, responsibilities and resources from centralized bureaucratic systems to involve smaller administrative units (Stewart & Davis-Morrison, 2002).

"Medicine, law, business, engineering - these are noble pursuits, and necessary to sus tain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love - these are what we stay alive for." 

In 1998, UNESCO carried out an evaluation of countries in this hemisphere in the areas of Mathematics and mother tongue (English, Spanish, French). The results showed that the performance of the Cuban primary school children far exceeded that of any other country in the region'.

When the International Association for Music Education (ISME) held its conference in Tampa Florida in 1994, nine Caribbean music educators attended. But the enthusiasm with which they greeted the various events waned when the time came for ISME's national associations to meet. There was no such association in the Caribbean. There were no regional music associations of any kind despite the many commonalities that exist in musical cultures and education systems across the region.

Purpose This study was undertaken to unravel a conundrum. While the number of teachers trained to teach five subjects in grades 7–9 in the schools included in the Reform of Secondary Education Project in Jamaica almost equalled the number of teachers deployed to carry out these instructional responsibilities in those schools, after four years a significant number of the teachers deployed to teach the five subjects in grades 7–9 remained untrained.

During the last two decades, technology has improved extensively, bringing about changes in communication, transportation, and the performance of many other tasks. Technology has improved to the extent that societies across the world are questioning the validity of traditional modalities and are making rapid changes towards embracing these new developments. An example of this is "Virtual University", a computer software programme which allows the user to access course materials and class interaction via the Internet.