Creole Languages in Education and Their Role in Shaping Caribbean Identities: Models for Integrating English Lexifier Creoles into School Curricula in the Eastern Caribbean

In this dissertation, I will identify and analyze the serious problems that have arisen in the Caribbean due to the imposition of European colonial languages as languages of instruction in the education systems of those territories of the region where the majority of the population speak a creole language. I will also identify and analyze the attempts that the people of the Western Caribbean have made thus far to address these problems in order to envision how the peoples of the Eastern Caribbean might also find a way to begin to transform a formal educational system whose language policies have reduced their children to failures and victims into a system that equips their children to be powerful agents in the learning process.;When discussing solutions to the problems of the formal educational system in the Caribbean, I will be taking a novel approach, which I consider to be perhaps the most important and original contribution of this dissertation. I do not attempt to articulate possible solutions on the basis of models developed in the formal systems of the metropoles, because I refuse to turn my work into yet another colonial imposition of an inappropriate and imported 'fix' on the peoples of the region. Instead, I attempt to identify elements of the informal educational systems which have emerged organically over the past five centuries from the feminized, Africanized, Indigenized creole cultures of the Caribbean as both a foundation stone as well as a source of inspiration for the design and implementation of education policy and practice that serves our interests and reflects who we are as Caribbean peoples.