2013 UWI Schools of Education Biennial Conference

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Browsing 2013 UWI Schools of Education Biennial Conference by Subject "Academic achievement"

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    Deagriculturalization, industrialization, deindustrialization, postindustrialization, and Black academic underachievement in the United States and United Kingdom
    (2013-06-24) Mocombe, Paul C.; Tomlin, Carol; Wright, Cecile
    This article focuses on how the capitalist processes of deindustrialization and postindustrialization in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) contributed to and perpetuates the academic underachievement of black American and black British Caribbean youths in the US and UK, respectively. It is concluded that, contemporarily, the academic achievement gap between black Americans and whites in the US, and black British Caribbean youths and whites in the UK, is a result of what Paul C. Mocombe (2010) refers to as "a mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function," grounded in the relational processes of the capitalist social structure of class inequality of the two societies. In other words, the reason that 1) blacks have more limited skills in processing information from articles, books, tables, charts, and graphs compared with their white counterparts; and 2) the students who lose the most ground are the higher-achieving black children is due to the linguistic structure and social class functions of the black underclasses in the US and UK , which, with the help of corporate finance capital, have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for young black folks around the world. The article offers Mocombe's "mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function" as an heuristic tool for guiding future research on the black/white achievement gap in the US, UK, and globally
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    Investigating school performance in the primary sector of Trinidad and Tobago: An embedded case study [PowerPoint presentation]
    (2013-07-01) Rigaud, Phyllis
    The academic performance of schools has been and continues to be a topical issue in the academic literature. Concerns about poor academic performance of schools and inefficient education systems have been voiced by governments, educators, and researchers worldwide. In Trinidad and Tobago, quality education continues to be an elusive goal as particular education districts display poor academic performance consistently. As the first step to educational change in the North Eastern Education District, this three-strand embedded mixed methods case study initially surveyed 42 principals and 246 teachers to attain a general understanding of the organizational and instructional practices that pervade the schools of the district. The purpose of the study was to explore the educational practices in the primary schools to understand what ensuing roles those practices play towards the persistent poor academic performance of the schools in the district. The study therefore sought to answer: How do the educational practices in the primary schools influence the academic performance of schools in the North Eastern Education District? To support this question, the following main questions were posed: 1) What are the educational practices at the primary schools in the North Eastern Education District? and 2) What relations can be established between the educational practices and the academic performance of the schools, as exhibited in the schools' assessment data?
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    'Racialised facilitative capital' and the paving of differential paths to achievement of Afro-Trinidadian boys [PowerPoint presentation]
    (2013-07-02) Rampersad, Ravi
    Interrogating the achievement of Afro-Trinidadian boys requires a theoretical approach that appreciates both structures of race and their embodiment in daily discourse, and the postcolonial non-white majority context of Trinidad. As such, this paper employs a symbiotic theoretical platform which combines and augments Bourdieu's Sociology and Critical Race Theory (CRT). Adjusting for the context of Trinidad, a concept of 'racialised facilitative capital' is fashioned. While Bourdieu describes capital as the political building blocks of social order that give meaning to social accumulation and consumption, it is argued that in relation to Trinidad, it is also inherently raced. This is premised on an understanding of Trinidadian society as pigmentocratically structured, where lighter skin is rewarded with a myriad of social advantages, and darkness denigrated as illegitimate and 'other.' Arguably, the premium placed on lighter skin is manifested interdependently in the forms of social, economic, and cultural capital. The operation of capital as politic, not only reflects societal structures of power and domination, but importantly also contributes in the maintenance of said structures. The concept of 'Racialised facilitative capital' follows as inseparably both facilitator of social status and as racialised process