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.