Introducing any poetry composed in English into Japanese classrooms of higher education requires two processes: one is the translation of English poems into Japanese and the next is to familiarize Japanese students with the cultural contexts in which the poetry is written and read. Once the two requisites have been achieved, Japanese students are able to enjoy the culturally different world of English poetry.

Caribbean literature relies on the reader's capacity to identify elements of the textual landscape and interpret them within appropriate environmental, cultural and historical contexts. The pedagogical approaches discussed in this paper are taken from The Island School's [Bahamas] Literature of the Sea course which features an intensive study of St Lucian poet Derek Walcott's epic Omeros. Curriculum is designed to help students access these elements of the text through observation and direct interaction.

“Without further commitments and action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the world is likely to warm by more than 3° above the preindustrial climate. Even with the current mitigation commitments and pledges fully implemented, there is roughly a 20 percent likelihood of exceeding 4° by 2100. If they are not met, a warming of 4° could occur as early as the 2060s.

The Western tourist in the Caribbean is unavoidably in a position of in-authenticity and naïve but guilty spectatorship—always already on the outside; always ready with a camera—to take /capture/shoot static moments of picturesque in-significance. “Here’s one of me in front of the hotel…on the beach…outside the Independence Monument…” The relation of the ‘tourist’ to the place visited is by its very nature one of impermanence, of temporary, fleeting and superficial pleasure—of escape from the ‘real world’.

Environmental writing and criticism have tended to stress the value of local knowledges and experience, which are often perceived as inherently resisting processes within modernity that separate human beings from direct, sensuous apprehension of their environment. More recently, however, writers such as Ursula Heise have begun to argue for a more ‘cosmopolitan’ form of consciousness in the modern world, thoughtfully engaged with modes of apprehending environmental connectivity (particularly within the new media) that have a global reach.

At the outset, Caribbean representations of nation depicted and were offered by male projections of Caribbean identity and experience. The 1940s to the 1970s were fraught with sociopolitical and literary constructions of national identities for the once enslaved and colonized Caribbean territories which were male-centred and which bore gendered assumptions concerning what was to be regarded as necessary for the creation and development of these nations.

The Caribbean Poetry Project (CPP) is a collaboration between The University of the West Indies (UWI), and the University of Cambridge, that has been running from 2010 to 2015. It began with a recognition that with all the changes in the UK’s literature curriculum, Caribbean poetry was not getting the exposure it deserved.

In this article I offer thoughts on my recent conceptualization of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) (Paris, 2012a), building from empirical work with youth of colour in US contexts, and consider what this conceptualization might mean for Jamaica and other countries where Creole Englishes are widely spoken as the lingua franca. Beginning with my own learning about Jamaican Creole and language variation as a child visiting my father’s native Jamaica, I move to sharing some of my research findings from studies of African American Language among youth in California.

This article summarizes a keynote address that I delivered at the 2013 Literacy Symposium on 22 March 2013 at the University of West Indies at Mona. It builds on the conference’s them: “Literacy for Peace, Progress, and Prosperity.” Although the desire for peace is a lofty, noble, and important goal, it is a complicated process and many systemic, deeply rooted, and inequitable realities interfere with this goal.