More in de Mortar dan de Pestle: Recruitment into Secondary Teaching in Trinidad and Tobago

Abstract

The excerpt above highlights that one concern of researchers who theorize about using concepts of postcolonialism is to unravel the complexity of construction of identity in the contested site of the, cultural-discursive, social-political, and material-economic (Kemmis and Grootenboer, 2008) postcolonial space. This chapter provides room for the postcolonial and post-independence voices of college-graduate,² secondary-school teachers from Trinidad and Tobago, who may have been “marginalised, silenced, ignored or denied” the opportunity to speak and gives them the opportunity to be “valued, heard and responded to” in this reinterpretation of identity formation through a recruitment process. It provides a critical look at a centralized practice of teacher recruitment in Trinidad and Tobago that occurred between 1966 (four years after Trinidad and Tobago gained independence from Great Britain) and 2000. This practice is in contrast to the neoliberalist, contractual employment arrangements that have crept into the public service after 2000 (Marchack n.d.). Nonetheless, today the practice of recruitment still looks very much like it did in the period under review.

“More to it than meets the eye. More to the story than was said.”

—John Mendes, Cote ci Cote la: Trinidad and Tobago Dictionary¹

Postcolonialism draws our theoretical attention to the ways in which language works in the colonial formation of discursive and cultural practices. It shows how discourse and power are inextricably linked. Politically, it enables us to provide an account of the ways in which global inequalities are perpetuated not only through the distribution of resources, but also through colonial modes of representation, and in doing this it suggests ways of resisting colonial power in order to forge a more socially just world order. (Rizvi, Lingard, and Lavia 2006, 250)