Explores the experiences of Caribbean women teachers who are recruited to teach in a mid sized Southern city. Narrative methods were used to analyze four Barbadian women teachers' perspectives on their: initial experiences and challenges; teaching philosophies and approaches to teaching American students; and successful transition into Louisville, Kentucky's public schools after five years of teaching. In an age where school districts across the nation seek educators from overseas to address the well-documented teacher shortage, this study has implications for helping future international teacher candidates transition into U.S. public schools.
214 p., This ethnographic case study was designed to explore with a sample of urban school administrators their responsiveness to the cultural and educational needs of English-speaking Caribbean immigrant students. The goal is to describe and interpret the culture of Enwood High School through administrators' beliefs, values, actions, assumptions, and cultural artifacts in order to develop a better understanding of their responsiveness to the cultural and educational needs of English-speaking Caribbean immigrant students that will ultimately help to improve their learning outcome.
176 p., Colleges and universities continue to add diversity and internationalization as major components of their strategic planning efforts. Students from various racial, ethnic and national backgrounds are expected to live and work together in an intellectual environment while bringing with them various views of race and culture that are maintained through varying myths and misconceptions. This study looked at the technical and cultural definitions of what it means to be 'Black' in the U.S. and the stereotypes of being classified within that racial category for college students from Africa and the Caribbean.
233 p., The experiences of Black females have received little attention in Canadian research on education. As a result, little is known about how Black females experience schooling, and even less is known about the specific challenges they face on account of their gender and its interconnection with race, class, immigrant status and other aspects of their identity. In this dissertation, I examine the schooling experiences of a group of young, Black, females of Caribbean descent. Through the use of anti-racism feminism and immigrant integration theories, the author looks at the relationship between their experiences of school and their understanding of their identity. Argues that the young women's negotiation of schooling is intimately linked to their understanding of their identity - an understanding that is filtered through race and gendered lenses, and is a product of their status as Canadian children of immigrant, Caribbean parents, living in a multicultural society.
279 p., Offers a comparative analysis of foreign students at Tuskegee Institute between 1892 and 1935. During this time, aspiring young people from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia coalesced on the rural Alabama campus, creating a unique cultural space. As people of African descent disproportionately found themselves under oppressive social, economic, and political conditions, Tuskegee Institute emerged as a cultural and intellectual safe haven for both American born and foreign students. Foreign scholars and activists such as Jose Marti, Juan Gomez, J. A. Aggrey, Pambini Mzimba, and Marcus Garvey used Tuskegee as a symbol of Black Nationalism, political solidarity, borrowing their methods to uplift darker peoples of the world.
306 p., While it has long been assumed that schooling is integral to the construction of modern nation-states, surprisingly little is known about whether and how teachers actually go about transmitting national culture in the classroom. Relying on ethnographic research conducted in lycées on the French island of Martinique, including classroom observations, semi-structured interviews with teachers, informal interviews with school administrators and regional policymakers, and archival research, the author explores the ways in which history-geography teachers negotiate the construction of national and regional identities on an everyday basis, and in doing so become active participants in the formation of these identities within schools. The author finds that teachers in Martinique have long had significant influence over the implementation of national curricula.
96 p., The purpose of this applied dissertation study was to determine the relative impact of parental involvement, parental school perception, student generation status, and Caribbean adolescents' own attitudes and behavior towards academic achievement and reading comprehension skills. For this study, 45 Caribbean parents from Grenadian, Guyanese, Haitian, Jamaican, and Trinidadian backgrounds reported in survey form on their involvement, volunteerism, school perception, student behavior and educational achievements of students at the school of study. Students' course grades were obtained from their official school records and were broken down by generational status.
172 p., Although selective colleges and universities boast higher numbers of Black students more than ever before, new data show that a disproportionate number of these Black students are of immigrant-origin rather than native-born. The data also show that students of immigrant origin (at least one parent born outside the United States) attend selective, predominantly White institutions and Ivy League colleges and universities at disproportionately higher rates than native Black students (both parents born in the United States).
347 p., Historically, the integration of European immigrants and their children into U.S. society has been signified by their ability to assimilate into White middle-class society and enjoy the advantages of upward mobility. However, similar privileges are not experienced by immigrants of color; most often these groups assume a minority status in the United States, which (i) creates socio-economic impediments in their journey toward upward mobility and (ii) destabilizes their deeply embedded notions of self and identity. Within this social dilemma, 1.5 and second generation U.S.-born children of Caribbean immigrants occupy a distinctive and theoretically-valuable location for researchers. Grounded in critical race theory and the notion that racial hierarchies and racism are inescapable markers of the Black experiences in the U.S., this study explores the ways in which ten children of Caribbean immigrants come to understand themselves and their place in U.S. racial discourses and conventions given the racial and ethnic socialization messages they receive at home and their experiences with institutionalized racism and racial hierarchies in U.S. schools.
172 p., Retention and graduation rates for minorities, especially African Americans, tend to be lower than for their White peers. Although much research exists on retention and factors that affect retention of African American students, very little seems to address African Caribbean students. The rationale for this qualitative study grew out of the researcher's desire to learn about African Caribbean students and their experiences at predominantly White institutions of higher education in the United States. The researcher hoped that the findings on the persistence of African Caribbean students may lead institutions and administrators to re-examine the current supports they now provide as they attempt to improve student retention for all students. The data collection methods included interviews, observations, and document analysis. The research sample included 10 African Caribbean students between the ages of 18 and 28 pursuing undergraduate degrees (Bachelors) and 3 administrators at two predominantly White institutions located in the New York area.
