In the intersection of policy and practice: Detranslation and plantation pedagogy

This presentation illustrates and explores the ways in which educators- first at the tertiary level in Guyana and then at the primary level in Trinidad and Tobago - tap into indigenous knowledge to transform educational practices.Research Questions: We explore the following research questions: 1. How do Caribbean educators transcend the limitations of their inherited understandings of teaching and education? 2. What are the roles of Caribbean educators in facilitating a decolonised approach to pedagogy and policy implementation? 3. How do professionals tap into Indigenous knowledges to transform professional and pedagogical practices? We employ indigenous methodologies- groundings and storytelling- to accesses and analyse the interaction between history, practice and international demands. In both cases we work with small groups of educators (10-15). We argue 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 globalisation where policy making and teaching practices are used for global positioning (Hartley 2003). We interrogate historically located dependency and external frames of referencing and recognise this inheritance as a site of tension between the local (indigenous) and the global.