Despite the increased popularity of STEM education worldwide, there is much haziness about what constitutes STEM education. This theoretical paper seeks to stimulate discussion on what STEM is and how it should be implemented. It positions an integrated STEM approach as foundational to education but advocates a shift from the compartmentalized focus on the silos of subject disciplines to one that is phenomenon-based.

In their seminal Caribbean Education Strategy Report, Jules, Miller, and Armstrong (2000) argued that in order to meet the developmental objectives of an internationally competitive labour force by the year 2020, the Caribbean region would need to be able to demonstrate “a 30% increase in persons with qualifications in science and technology at the postsecondary level” (p. xviii). These authors also noted their concern that “the region as a whole lags far behind in science and technology, and a more concerted effort is needed to bridge that gulf” (p. 27).

While western qualitative research methodologies have been embraced in their efforts to explore various worldviews including those of Caribbean people, the reception from academia for culturally relevant ways of knowing has been subdued. In recent publications, liming and ole talk has been presented as an appropriate approach to researching and understanding how people from the Caribbean region and diaspora see and interpret the world. The discussion now centres on distinguishing liming as a research methodology and ole talk as a research method.

Teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and their influence on grammar instruction has long been a controversial issue. For the present study a sample of Caribbean university instructors (n=10) of foreign language were consulted through questionnaires and open-ended interviews to investigate potential links between their fundamental pedagogical beliefs and the teaching strategies they chose to apply as they taught undergraduate students of a foreign language.

Mentorship is an important aspect of student growth and development. Students who are mentored have been shown to have superior outcomes on leadership and cognitive skills. Using data from the 2011 Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership, analyses were conducted to see how personal characteristics and types of mentor influenced mentoring outcomes among a sample of 482 students at a university in the Caribbean. The study design used Astin’s Input-Environment-Output model of student assessment.

This study sought to determine whether there are significant gender and school type differences in the value that Jamaican secondary school students attach to education. Data was collected from 368 students from nine secondary schools and analysed using descriptive statistics, and independent sample T-tests. The results revealed that the students valued education for instrumental purposes and their value of education was moderately low. There were significant gender and school type differences in the value they attached to education.

The demand and supply for higher education are now global, and the trend in the global market for higher education is rapidly becoming even more global in character. University graduates will enter a global labour market; therefore, they want to:
1. graduate from a university with global recognition and international ranking;
2. be equipped with the highest quality education, and;
3. experience a global exposure to people, places, and cultures from as many countries as possible.
 

The papers in this issue offer much food for thought about the future of education in the Caribbean. On the one hand, they invite us to think about the possibilities and challenges inherent in getting our educational institutions ready for an increasingly globalized and changing world. On the other hand, they remind us that as we reach outward, we must not forget there is still much to be done internally.

Non-formal education is unquestionably the most elusive and ill-defined sector of distance educators' work worldwide. The label gets pasted on such diverse activites as health education, agricultual education and traning for farmers, women's group activities, income-generation activities, adult literacy classes, leisure time education for adults, out-of-school schools for young dropouts, second language teaching, AIDS awareness campaigns, and work-based traning at worker and management levels.

The paper takes the position that diversity is an endemic feature of Caribbean tertiary education in the region and that it allows for rapid and appropriate response to local and national needs. Coordination through articulation is useful, however, for promoting unity in diversity and facilitating regional mobility for continued employment or for studies, without loss of time or credit for past learning experiences. Articulation models vary and are influenced by philosphical orientation and stakeholders' interests.