The new program in secondary school education, namely the Alternative Pathways to Secondary Education (APSE), presents opportunities for educational development in Jamaica. In our estimation, the approach offers numerous benefits such as differential instruction, individualized learning and hopefully more collaborative learning possibilities. Moreover, pedagogical instruction using the APSE approach embraces more 21st century skills and facilitates more learning that is geared towards developing students’ higher order skills. Approaches similar to the APSE have been implemented to varying degrees in countries such as Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong and are one of the factors that have contributed to their educational success.
APSE also fulfils the educational projections for Vision 2030 and the National Education Strategic Plan. These policies serve to provide high quality education for all Jamaican children. These three policies also promise to enhance learners performance across all educational settings. What is more, the previously mentioned policies should also create more equality by providing more learning opportunities for all Jamaican students. With these three initiatives working in tandem, there should be an improvement in Jamaican students’ educational attainments.
Despite all the gains and changes in pedagogical approaches used in Jamaican classrooms, we strongly believe that many will not reach disengaged schools, particularly those in inner-city communities. That is, we cannot expect significant changes unless we recruit students’ different subcultural practices and out of school experiences in school learning. There are a myriad of studies that show the benefits of including students’ culture in school learning. The inclusion of students’ out of school learning in school learning contributes to greater engagement in school learning and feelings of value in the learning process. This incorporation of students’ out of school learning is largely missing from many Jamaican classrooms.
With the breakdown of the Jamaican social fabric we need teaching and learning processes that will help students to feel more valued and self-confident. We are not proposing that the teaching and learning process alone will solve the social problems that we currently face in Jamaica. Instead we are saying, that we need to look at teaching beyond mere preparation for future participation in the labour force, and start to view these two processes as developing self-assured individuals who can analyze and critically solve the problems that they face in their day to day encounters. A good way to do this is to use students’ out of school experiences as tools for school learning. We need to encourage students to bring their out of school knowledge, that is the knowledge and experiences that they acquire in their communities and family, into the classroom and use these across all disciplines such as English, Social Studies and Mathematics. For example, we should find out some problems that students face in their day to day encounters and work these out in Mathematics or Science classes. As a former teacher and a current education researcher, we have seen where using students’ out of school knowledge generated more interest in school learning and have allowed students to feel more capable and self-assured as they become resource contributors in the classroom.
Therefore, we are proposing that we embrace teaching and learning processes that build on social constructivism, multiliteracies pedagogy, critical pedagogy, culturally responsive pedagogy and new literacies studies among others. These aforementioned theoretical applications view the student as possessors of knowledge and capable of making meaning in the classroom. Students are also seen as facilitators of knowledge who bring rich resources to the classroom. These approaches are used extensively in countries in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa and have created significant engagements partly among working class students, students who have difficulties in learning and students who express their knowledge differently. It is expedient that Jamaican curricular changes embrace more of these pedagogical methods rather than tired approaches that still see students as blank slates and consumers of knowledge.
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