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.

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the writing performance in English of African heritage students in Birmingham, England and Kingston, Jamaica. The study explores the effects of language use on the written production of English among African heritage students in two geographical locations, Birmingham, England and Kingston, Jamaica. Particular attention is drawn to the effects of Jamaican Creole usage in Jamaica and Creole/Black British Talk in England, on the achievement levels of African heritage students.

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.

A recent report of a workshop on educational curriculum and remediation held by the Eastern Caribbean Education Reform Project (ECERP), provides an interesting backdrop to language education in the Caribbean and incidentally supports the rationale for this book.

The 23 pages of "Notes" at the end of this book contain a set of cogent comments on some of the most fundamental and controversial issues affecting English teaching today. One is tempted to suggest that the teacher-in-training, for example, should begin a study of this book with a series of group discussions on the topics treated in these Notes. Surely the modern English teacher must have carefully considered the following: the importance of "context situation"; the emphasis on the tripartite interaction of language, other experience and thought; and the analysis of spontaneous talk.

The simple title of the book, What do Jamaican children speak? A language resource, belies the complexity of what the author, Michele Kennedy, successfully does in describing the language that many Jamaican children bring to the classroom given our variable language situation. This variability exists because two codes, Jamaican English (JE) and the English-lexified Jamaican Creole (JC) coexist, and the distinctions between them are often blurred in the minds of its speakers.

The writers identify the aim of their efforts as seeking to place the discussion of the phenomenon of a gap between the academic underachievement of Whites and Blacks in the context of post-industrial societies. Post-industrialism is set in the post-1970s, defined with reference to a paradigm shift.

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.