| dc.description.abstract | This presentation illustrates and explores ways in which educators at the tertiary level in Guyana and the primary level in Trinidad tap into indigenous knowledge to transform educational practices. It seeks to explore: 1) how Caribbean educators transcend the limitations of their inherited understandings of teaching and education, 2) the roles of Caribbean educators in facilitating a decolonized approach to pedagogy and policy implementation, and 3) how professionals tap into indigenous knowledge to transform professional and pedagogical practices. Indigenous methodologies--groundings and storytelling-are employed to access and analyse the interaction among history, practice, and international demands. In both cases the researchers work with small groups of educators (10-15). It is argued that Caribbean educators need to promote practices of detranslation (Chesney 2011) and pedagogical-historical-specificity (Bristol 2012) to disrupt colonial reproductive tendencies endemic to educational practices. The findings highlight the critical role of education in postcolonial sites in an era of globalization where policy making and teaching practices are used for global positioning (Hartley 2003). The researchers interrogate historically located dependency and external frames of referencing, and recognize this inheritance as a site of tension between the local (indigenous) and the global | |
