Academic literature on the topic 'Children's stories, Jamaica'

Olive Senior has become a significant literary voice within Caribbean literature and the Caribbean diaspora, often providing light, sharp, subtle, and emotionally laden stories and poems of childhood and belonging. As she describes here, her work remains “embedded” in Jamaica, including its soundscape and its ecology, and stretches across fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children’s literature. For decades she has enjoyed a growing international audience, and her work is taught in schools in the Caribbean as part of an evolving literary curriculum. Senior’s short stories, the primary focus of this discussion, are especially well known for their enchanting, vibrant, and insightful children and child narrators — a trait that situates Senior’s work in relation to other famed Caribbean authors (Sam Selvon, Michael Anthony, Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Collins, and many more). In this interview, explorations of some of her young female voices are set within Denise DeCairns Narain’s sense of Senior’s “oral poetics”, and are also explored in relation to issues of wealth, privilege, and emotional sincerity. Senior’s work — fictional and non-fictional — is also heavily invested in ideas of land, labour, and migrancy, and so her recent and striking short story “Coal”, from her latest collection The Pain Tree (2015), is considered alongside her enormously impressive historical study of the role of West Indian migrant labourers in the building of the Panama Canal, entitled Dying to Better Themselves (2014).

Taking as a starting point the need to excavate assumptions of northern educational practice as normative or standard setting, this research project examines the interface between home and school cultures and the consequences for children’s learning strategies in their upper primary years at Scottish and Jamaican schools. Particular attention is paid to how metaphors and narratives are encoded differently in school culture than in children’s popular culture. Several different studies show that learners make crucial conceptual decisions about their identities and strategies through these years of development. Both strategies and identities are embedded within the on-going narratives that learners receive, retell, and revise. These stories interplay with the meta-narratives of the culture settings learners inhabit. These meta-narratives include those of child development, economic development and educational policy; they contrast, sometimes sharply, with powerful forms of expression and narratives within popular culture. Drawing on insights from educational ethnography and socio-linguistics and taking into account the differing meanings that post-industrial or post-development might have in each context, the study is a dialogue with children and teachers about how they represent and make sense of school in the context of the complex and quickly changing popular culture that surrounds them. The study begins with a consideration of how Bakhtin’s unique perspective on language and discourse can be applied to cross cultural educational research, particularly what insights his approach contributes to grappling with the problem of the ethnocentricity of the hermeneutic circle. In the process the differing ways Bakhtin has been taken up by educational and discourse researchers such as Wertsch, Hall, and Maybin are examined. The resulting approach is then applied to two classrooms in each country setting. The picture that emerges is one in which the dominant metaphors of education and the attendant constructs of childhood clash against children’s lived experience and increasing engagement with popular and high tech culture. Children’s ability to “sample” stories’ multiple possibilities and to borrow infectiously from each other defies the linear construct of story or narrative as taught in the syllabus, yet, coincides with Bakhtin’s understanding of language and communication as fundamentally dialogic.

This chapter charts the experiences of mixed-race migrants competing with legitimate relatives in Britain. In particular, it examines a number of inheritance lawsuits between Jamaicans of color in Britain and their white relatives over a shared colonial estate. It contends that constrictions in the definition and legal standing of kinship at the turn to the nineteenth century suddenly made mixed-race Jamaicans improper members of extended, Atlantic families. Increasing discomfort with mixed-race family members is also demonstrated in sentimental fiction at the time. The chapter assesses a large number of novels and fictional tracts in the last decade of the eighteenth century that included migrants of color as key characters in their stories. The inclusion of such characters was employed to excoriate the illegitimacy, marginal position, and racial divergence of mixed-race people in Britain. Finally, the chapter traces the experiences of the mothers of color left in Jamaica and the ways they attempted to advocate for their children across the Atlantic.

The Caribbean and Latin America is the second most disaster-prone region globally. Between 2000 and 2019, the Caribbean region faced over 170 hurricanes, 148 tropical storms, eight earthquakes, and several floods. Generally, disasters have an adverse economic, social and psychological impact; however, it should be possible to reduce the severity through planning, preparation, and appropriate, timely action. Some natural hazards, such as hurricanes, are cyclical and should only become disasters when there is damage or loss of resources, lives and livelihood. Game-based blended learning focused on prevention and preparation can build knowledge and awareness, contributing to building resilience, specifically, the ability to withstand and recover from natural hazards. This article postulates that resilience should be encouraged from a young age because resilient children can become resilient adults and contributors to a society capable of functioning during crises or difficult situations, including natural hazards and disasters. // The proposed strategy involves a Be Alert Game (BAG) piloted in small groups, with children ages seven to ten, in four countries in the Caribbean (Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica and the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago). Surveys were administered before and after the game was tested. The feedback from these surveys were used to determine learners’ knowledge and approach before and after playing the game. // The game focuses on four natural hazards (hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanoes), their key features, pre-emptive and preparatory steps, and the potential impact of inaction. Gamers are encouraged to learn about natural events and disaster prevention by participating in interactive quizzes, drag-and-drop activities, researching and engaging with their teachers, family, and friends. The final component of each of the four levels in the game uses a blended approach and is mindful of the local context; thus, the location of the nearest emergency shelters will differ. Multimedia components include images, voice-over, music, sound effects, interactive buttons, animated characters and closed captioning. The developers will use the feedback from the participants to improve on the levels and interactive elements, which are all geared toward building resilience and preparing for natural hazards through game-based open learning.