Classrooms in schools in the Caribbean are typically described as teacher­centred with students as passive, dependent learners. Teacher training programmes year after year grapple with the task of transforming this scenario, but seemingly with little success. How do we make teaching more learner centred? How do we enable students to become more independent learners and to feel that their success or failure is under their own control? How do we prepare young people for adult civic involvement? These questions are at the centre of some of the articles in this volume. 

The purpose of this study was to explore how parents perceive the benefits of the East Street and Greater Portmore Junior Centre Visual and Performing Arts After School Program (JSVPASP). This research employs a qualitative research design which, according to Creswell (2014), is “a means for exploring and understanding the meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem” (p. 246). This research is therefore aimed at exploring recent and relevant research articles relating to visual and performing arts and its benefits to children.

This paper utilized a non-empirical theoretical research framework for the purpose of examining possible solutions to the ethical and methodological dilemmas facing educational researchers. Two questions guided the examination: a) How relevant is research ethics in education research? and b) Which paradigm is a good fit for education research?

This paper uses a case study approach to examine the journals of three mature foreign language learners who participated in a project to promote learner autonomy. The learners' journals revealed that while they shared some of the concerns of their younger peers, a few factors impacted more heavily on their learning outcomes and successes. Two of these factors are examined in this paper. The first factor was the learners' affective state, in particular, their anxiety upon resuming foreign language learning after many years of attrition.

This paper takes up the Jamaican Creole/Standard English (JC/SE) debates and argues that they often reproduce false binaries between Creole and English and the oral and written. I map out some of their terrain by sampling editorials and letters from local newspapers, the Gleaner and the Observer, and offer up a brief history of the various positions of linguists and educators on the SE/JC question.

... there is now, in the new international order of the globalized (information) economy, a gap to be bridged by a dialogue founded on realism and...on solidarity, without which the populations of the Fourth World, at least, will continue to suffer in poverty and oblivion. 
F. H. Cordoso, North-South Relations in the Present Context 

This article describes a literacy initiative for basic school children. It is about young children, teachers, and literature books for children in the basic schools in Zone 40, Clarendon, Jamaica. It is a grassroots project involving approximately 60 teachers in 34 basic schools who collectively teach about 2,200 children, 3-6 years of age. The purpose of this initiative was to infuse literature for children and related literacy strategies into a read-aloud programme to promote the literacy development of young children in the zone.

English is the official language in Jamaica as in all the Anglophone Caribbean islands. It is the language of the law courts, the banks, the established church, for example. It is the linguistic badge which one wears when one wants to identify with a certain level of sophistication, of linguistic competence, and of having “arrived” in a highly stratified society. Jamaican Creole, an English-related Creole, is the language of the people. It is the language they use in day-to-day relaxed situations.