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Creole in the Classroom: Political Grammars and Educational Vocabularies

The Caribbean Creoles spoken in the United Kingdom include French-based Creoles brought from islands such as Dominica and St Lucia but spoken by a relatively small number of British people, and the more widely spoken English-based Creoles of islands such as Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados. In the emigration from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom between the late 1940s and the mid 1960s Jamaica provided by far the largest numbers and has also been an increasingly important source of popular culture for many British people of Caribbean origin. This has contributed to the emergence of Jamaican Creole as the dominant Creole influence on the speech of young blacks born in Britain, regardless of parental provenance. This paper will argue that a number of approaches have been made to the issue of the place of Creole in British education and that these have themselves been shaped by a range of political 'grammars' evident in educational debates over language since the 1960s. Many of these approaches, however, have paid little regard to the actual Creole-utilizing practices of the young people who are their object. On the basis of ethnographic evidence it is clear that the issue of the relationship between Creole use and 'ethnic identity' is not simple, and that a consistent subversion of simple notions of ethnicity is evident in the language of young inner-city blacks. Rather than existing as a cultural given, ethnicity functions much more as a political resource amongst other resources and is often strategically employed in everyday anti-racist struggle. The strategic use of Creole and the simultaneous development of a 'mixed', Creole-inflected London English shared to varying degrees across racial and 'ethnic' boundaries suggests that much of the political and educational debate is now misplaced. It also makes clear the need for a deconstruction of essential notions of