Plantation Pedagogy originates from an Afro-Caribbean primary school teacher's experience. It provides a discourse which extends and illuminates the limitations of current neo-liberal and global rationalizations of the challenges posed to a teacher's practice. Plantation pedagogy is distinguished from critical pedagogy by its historical presence and its double-faced manifestations as simultaneously oppressive and subversive. Plantation pedagogy privileges and relocates educational transformation within the cultural arena, so that culture and history become the vehicles for teaching, educational research, and social transformation. It returns the work of education to the community; promotes an interconnection among the personal stories of the teacher, the historical narratives and memories of the community of teaching, and the professional advocacy of the teaching community; and advances an incomplete decolonization project of public political education.
«In 'Plantation Pedagogy', Laurette S. M. Bristol provides a stunning, theoretically informed, empirically grounded and politically astute account of how the 'plantation pedagogy' of teachers in postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago has been formed and informed by both the colonial past and colonial present. She proffers a sustained postcolonial argument for the necessary transformation of plantation pedagogy, set within present globalized and neo-liberal policy contexts. This book makes a significant contribution to postcolonial theory, methodology, epistemology, and politics.» (Robert Lingard, Professor, The University of Queensland, Australia)
«Few books have probed into the hidden domains of colonial education as forcefully and as thoughtfully as Laurette S. M. Bristol's brave, new book, 'Plantation Pedagogy'. Against a backdrop of an agonistic past, Dr. Bristol offers a stirring call for a pedagogy of liberation and a manifesto for postcolonial pedagogical change. Dr. Bristol's is a distinctive and refreshing voice in the educational field. This book should be required reading for scholars of global studies in education and for the general reader as well.» (Cameron McCarthy, Professor, College of Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
«Few books have probed into the hidden domains of colonial education as forcefully and as thoughtfully as Laurette S. M. Bristol's brave, new book, 'Plantation Pedagogy'. Against a backdrop of an agonistic past, Dr. Bristol offers a stirring call for a pedagogy of liberation and a manifesto for postcolonial pedagogical change. Dr. Bristol's is a distinctive and refreshing voice in the educational field. This book should be required reading for scholars of global studies in education and for the general reader as well.» (Cameron McCarthy, Professor, College of Education, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)