The purpose of this article is to describe the origins of qualitative inquiry, research and writing in the Caribbean. The period under review goes back more than 200 years. The paper begins with a discussion of the criteria for determining what counts as qualitative research, the conditions under which research was conducted and made public in the 19th century, and the differences in standards between then and now. It will then briefly describe the categories of work that meet most or all of these criteria for qualitative research.

This paper will focus on a very specific form of qualitative research described as critical performance ethnography. I will begin with some general definitions in order to arrive at a description and understanding of critical peiformance ethnography. The scholar Michelle Fine outlines three positions in qualitative research. These are very general but I think they will be helpful at arriving at critical performance ethnography. 

I would like to specially welcome this issue of JEDIC and the special papers that came out of our inaugural conference, 'Qualitative Inquiry in the Caribbean: Past, Present and Future'. It was a special conference because for the first time so many colleagues (150 or more) came together as a community of qualitative researchers from other departments on the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies, other universities in Jamaica, our sister campuses and other international universities.

Our core mission as a faculty and university is to generate ideas that provide answers to our society's challenging problems through our research work. Qualitative inquiry encompasses the investigation into human experience. This is a dynamic experience as it is lived, felt, made sense of and undergoes metamorphism. The qualitative inquirer seeks to understand and report on experiences with the use of authentic methods to observe and probe, thereby revealing the interactions, intentions and meanings of human experiences. 

It was while we were attending the Third Congress of Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign in 2007 that the idea of hosting a Qualitative Symposium at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, was conceived. Although as a School of Education we had made much progress in accepting the qualitative approach as an acceptable way to do research, there was still a sense that those who used qualitative methods were operating in isolation.

There are several disadvantages of Rasch and other probabilistic models that outweigh those of the raw score classical test theory models. Examiners, parents and students can be mystified by the Rasch and probabilistic models as they may be less relevant in formative or training contexts. For these reasons, a raw score model of rater severity and rater fit was constructed and was applied to a data set of 8708 English Language proficiency candidates. This model is more intuitive and thus easier to explain to the stakeholders, including examiners, as a preliminary quality control tool.

Recent comments that the school curriculum of Trinidad and Tobago is “culturally irrelevant” prompted this research project. The research was undertaken through a series of focus group discussions with community artists, curriculum officers and public figures interested in education, to explore the following issues:
1. a definition of and justification for the concept of ‘cultural relevance’
2. evidence of its existence or lack of existence in the current school curriculum

The article addresses the funding of higher education in a period when there is increased pressure on governments to reduce their funding support to higher education, and on universities to become more creative in expanding their own sources of funding. The article demonstrates that universities have and will continue to benefit from the combined private and public approaches to the funding of higher education, with cost sharing being the philosophical base of this model.

Science syllabuses, standardized examinations, and teacher content knowledge are critical to the development of scientific literacy. In this study, we quantify the presence of biological evolution in the Caribbean Secondary Examinations Certificate (CSEC) biology syllabus and examinations as well as evaluate the level of evolutionary knowledge held by teachers in the country of Belize. Analyses of the biology syllabus (2002) and the 2005–2012 examinations suggest that biological evolution plays a minimal role at the secondary level in the Caribbean.

Previous studies have identified sociocultural factors as one set of classroom variables impacting students’ performance in science. In this study, Jamaican grade 12 students’ perceptions of the sociocultural environment of their chemistry classes were measured, using a modified version of the Sociocultural Environment Scale (SCES) developed by Jegede and Okebukola (1988). The six sociocultural factors explored in this study are: authoritarianism, goal structure, traditional cosmology, societal expectations, sacredness of science and language.