“We'll have to re-write history”: Postcolonial education on the island state of the Commonwealth of Dominica

摘要

This ethnographic study examines the relationships between colonialized education, cultural negotiation, and migration within the context of the colonial/postcolonial island of Dominica. Using postcolonial theory, the overarching aim was to gain understanding of how people of the former colonial island relate to the education they received and how that relationship influenced people’s interactions with their home. The two-month field study consisted of observational notes and 12 semi-structured one-on-one interviews with Dominican-born citizens who attended secondary school on the island. Participants ranged in when they attended secondary school: some attended prior to Dominica’s 1978 independence from Britain; some began before independence, but ended after; and some attended only after independence.The conclusions of this study encompass (1) how participants feel their education reflected and perpetuated Dominican cultural identity, (2) how participants feel their education impacted their perceptions of the needs to emigrate, and (3) how these notions of cultural identity and emigration bolster or diminish each other. Participants felt their cultural identity was, at most, a secondary thought of the education system or was not represented by the education system at all. Some participants saw emigration as needed in order to use their education to become financially successful; others believed that education was a tool for making emigration possible, but only to gain more knowledge before returning to contribute to Dominica. These viewpoints led to questions of nationalism, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism, concepts which appeared throughout this study. Regardless of a participant’s place on this spectrum of perspectives, attitudes involved cultural negotiation and notions of modernity, and came to be seen as a duality where individuals simultaneously cherished cultural identity while striving to meet standards of modernity that threaten or force adaptation upon said cultural identity.