The Latin American reality reflects a continent full of contrasts where youth is expected to play a key role in the transformation of society. Demographic studies indicate that the percentage of young people in Latin America is greater than at any time in the past. These young people have witnessed a significant increase in opportunities for higher education in Latin America, especially in Venezuela, where student enrolment has doubled in less than two decades.

This issue of the Journal of Education and Development in the Caribbean contains articles that use a variety of methodologies and span countries in both the English-speaking Caribbean and Latin America. The article by Garcia Pena, Da Silva, Angelucci and Csoban, in fact, compares youth in higher education in Latin America and the Caribbean. Two of the articles were originally presented at the Biennial Conference on Education held at the University of the West Indies on the St. Augustine campus in Trinidad and Tobago in 2013.

Through case study methodology, this article outlines a contextual pedagogical framework for the development of an M.Ed in ECE programme. It describes the considerations made in the development of the programme and then juxtaposes them against best practice guidelines as outlined by extant literature on the principles of andragogy and higher education programme development. The findings suggest that higher education programmes need to be aligned to the needs of students and the contexts in which they are situated.

Higher education has been positioned as an important contributor to development in low-income countries in the context of the knowledge economy. This paper assesses the potential for building sustainable higher education systems that can contribute to development in low-income countries. The premise of this paper is that developing countries cannot be researched in isolation.

To understand the significance of the online launch of this issue of the Journal of Education and Development in the Caribbean (JEDIC), one must understand its beginnings. Created by the late Professor Dennis Craig and Professor Emerita Zellynne Jennings-Craig, JEDIC was birthed out of a need to produce scholarly research by and for the Caribbean people, pertaining to both education and development. The first issue, published in June 1997 in Guyana, produced four articles, one book review and one thesis abstract.

The Caribbean tertiary landscape must inject the sine qua non of quality assurance in its daily operations to be in sync with world trends. This single statement largely constitutes the poto mitan of Anna Kasafi Perkins’ anthology Quality in Higher Education in the Caribbean. Her florilegium investigates a host of pioneering work on improving quality in the service of 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.
 

This study aims to determine Belizean high school students’ perceived barriers to higher education. Data was collected from 1175 senior high school students in Belize, Cayo, Stann Creek, and Toledo districts via an online questionnaire. We found that the majority of students intended to pursue higher education. Ordinal logit, ordinal probit and linear models were used to determine the factors significant (p-value <0.1) for predicting students’ probability of intent to pursue higher education.

This reflective essay looked at the critical friends approach to faculty development, in particular, its role in enhancing teaching skills and reflection in a Certificate in University Teaching and Learning project. The paper drew on the experiences of teaching staff, engaging in a faculty development project and used the insights from actual practice to corroborate the literature and advance the conversation on critical friends. The experience of learning throughout the faculty development project was enhanced by reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action.

This study explored male perspectives of their educational experiences in the Trinidad and Tobago school system. It examined key push factors responsible for leading males away from pursuing higher education as well as factors responsible for male underachievement at the post-secondary and tertiary levels. This qualitative study utilized six focus groups comprising 56 participants from private and public post-secondary and tertiary institutions located in largely North-East, Central and South Trinidad.