Identity in the Caribbean Today

Reviving the past in the present has been one of the key ideas throughout this research. Narratives of Caribbean history have been influenced by a shared colonial past, and today we find countries with a wide variety of political statuses, each concerned with constructing their national identity. To understand identity in the Caribbean today, one has to look at our* creole culture that came out of this colonial history and was formed by Amerindian, European, African and Asian influences.

Teaching Indigenous History and Heritage

In this research a mixed methods approach was employed to investigate how indigenous history and heritage have been represented in the curricula of public primary and secondary schools in several countries of the Caribbean. Content analysis of these documents was conducted at two levels: the intended and the enacted curriculum (Porter and Smithson 2001). The data collected this way was completed with data obtained from interviews and descriptive surveys.

Teachers’ perspectives were given a central role in the inquiry of how the guidelines provided by the curriculum were applied in daily classroom practice to teach about that chapter in history before the arrival of the Europeans, about the first inhabitants of the islands, their lifeways, and their culture. Teachers’ practice in the classroom is defined by many different elements. The Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) approach was applied to study how the teaching of indigenous history and heritage contents was influenced by the dimensions of teachers’ knowledge such as subject matter, instructional strategies, and curriculum, students’ understandings and context (Shulman 1986, 1987; Grossman 1990).

As a result of the research, a comprehensive analysis was obtained about how history and heritage from the pre-Columbian period is taught. At policy level, it was observed that contents of indigenous history and heritage are incorporated in core curriculum subjects of Social Science or Social Studies. The study of the first peoples of the Caribbean is principally oriented to aid in the formation of a national identity in the pupils. More recently, educational agenda in countries of the region are starting to call for a Caribbean identity in the school curriculum.

At a content level, this investigation showed that two perspectives of the inhabitants from before the European arrival (1492) are represented in teachers’ practices. One that corresponded to the  extinction of the Amerindians during the colonial period based on the narratives of the colonial historical records; and an emerging narrative of the survival of Amerindian heritage in contemporary Caribbean society based on ethnographic and archaeological records. It was noticed that the latter narrative of heritage continuity is gaining grounds in both formal and informal education settings. It was also clear that there is a need to design specialized instructional resources to enhance the teaching and learning about the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean.

Communities in the School Environment

Finally, at the level of teachers’ practice, it was observed that the role of the context is one of the most influential components. Teachers made decisions to adjust curriculum contents and instructional strategies based on their engagement and interaction with the communities in the school environment. It was precisely to try and understand the role of context that this investigation was conducted in two countries with no contemporary indigenous population (the Dominican Republic and St. Kitts-Nevis) and in Dominica, one of the few countries in the Caribbean with an officially recognized contemporary indigenous population.

One contribution of this research was the production of an educational hand-out for teachers and students with the collaborations and feedback from teachers who participated in workshops that were organized for the school communities in 2015. More information is available in this link.

[*I make use of the possessive pronoun our creole culture because of my heritage].

By Eldris Con Aguilar