Valuing Jamaican Patois/Creole

by Mark Sebba

A conference on the theme "Valuing Jamaican Patois/Creole" was held on 29th May 2002 at Newman College of HE in Birmingham, England, under the auspices of Jamaica 2K, a British based organisation which amongst other things, supports the development of Community Learning Centres with Basic Skills and ICT across Jamaica. The conference was billed as being "for educational professionals to explore the language and literacy continuum between Jamaican Patois/Creole and Standard English", with its main aim

to provide a forum […] to gain a better understanding of the importance and status of Jamaican Patois/Creole, to discuss issues and share ideas to move forward understanding of the importance of recognising Jamaican Patois/ Creole as a language, or way of speaking, to be valued in its own right. This understanding is crucial to the development of effective teaching strategies when working with Jamaican Patois/Creole learners studying in a Standard English speaking learning environment.

The conference was attended by around 40 people representing primary, secondary, further and adult education, ethnic minority achievement units, higher education and other sectors. The conference heard three keynote addresses.

• Prof. Gus John, Visiting Professor of Edu-cation and formerly Director of Education for the London Borough of Hackney, recalled the early days when Caribbeans were classed as "educationally subnormal" because of a lack of awareness about Creole. He brought copies of Cassidy's Jamaica Talk and the first (1967) edition of the Dictionary of Jamaican English by Frederic Cassidy and R. B. Le Page, and spoke about how important these books had been in the 1960s in establishing the right of Jamaican Creole to be considered a language.
  
  
• Clement Lambert from the Institute of Education at the University of the West Indies outlined three options relating to the role of Creole and Standard English in education.
  1. Develop Creole as a language of instruction, with the accompanying resources which will be required to enable children to become bilinguals in Creole and Standard English.
  2. Recognise that many children entering school have Creole as a first language, support and value it, and then "move aggressively" towards acquisition of the target language, Standard English.
  3. Pretend Creole does not exist, and treat the children as first-language speakers of Standard English.

  Of these the third had been tried and failed; and the Jamaican education system had now accepted (2). Option (1) was ruled out due, amongst other things, to lack of resources.

• Mary Nelson (Ethnic Minority Achieve-ment manager, Wolverhampton Local Education Authority, West Midlands) talked about her work with new arrivals from Jamaica and longer established children in schools in her area. There are in fact a substantial number of children arriving from Jamaica (in spite of a widespread perception that migration is now the other way, if any) with obvious language issues. She brought along a document produced by the Education Service called Meeting the needs of new arrivals from Jamaica: information and advice for schools. This was developed as a resource for teachers and other education professionals working with new arrivals.

A personal reflection on the conference

It was good to find a large number of people interested in issues to do with Creole, and for them to have a chance to meet and talk to each other. On the other hand, there was something a bit depressing about the impression that in 20 years, little had changed, with few new resources having been created, and some of the main sources of support and development, like the Inner London Education Authority, having been abolished.

It seems to me that future meetings need to decide what the priorities are and focus on specific issues. Different people have different agendas and there are a variety of actual or possible goals: for example, to integrate children from Jamaica, support their language development, and help them to speak and write Standard English; to encourage adult learners of Caribbean heritage and to help them to write Standard English; to motivate British-born African-Caribbeans to use and appreciate Patois (either for its own sake or as a means to help them develop their writing skills in Standard English).

One thing was little touched on, but I think it may be significant. Unlike other minority languages, Creole/Patois actually has high, though often covert, prestige among adolescents of all races. The associations of Jamaican Creole with music and dance make it popular well beyond the boundaries of the Caribbean community. This fact should provide a way of both promoting Patois as a language of culture (enabling it to be taken 'seriously' as a language) and making it interesting to adolescents. What we need to develop is a strategy for doing this.