Welcome Message from the Director
The Centre was set up through the Research Initiative for Supporting Education in the Caribbean (RISE Caribbean), a project funded by a partnership between The University of the West Indies Cave Hill campus and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). A major goal of the RISE project is to have a “functioning educational research centre with an interdisciplinary research focus, where research supports decision-making and policy development for educational innovation and development in the Eastern Caribbean and Barbados”. We are indeed very excited to have created this digital space that is part of the achievement of that goal.
We are indeed happy that you have chosen to come here, and we hope that we are able to meet your need for resources to inform your research project.
The Caribbean Educational Research Centre or CERC as we fondly call it, was established to answer the call for more research to inform educational policy, planning and practice in the region, and for a means of making the outcomes of such research available to educators, other researchers and other stakeholders for whom this information is of interest. To ensure that research findings are available to different audiences, the CERC website will present a variety of features that we hope will meet the diverse needs of these audiences. For example, you will find:
- Research Briefs/Bulletins: Short papers that summarise aspects of research undertaken by CERC and its partnering entities. Each brief will have a specific focus, making it easy to read and understand, and will give suggestions as to how the evidence-driven information presented may be used, perhaps to shape practice or inform policy.
- Education Blogs: Brief papers prepared by CERC staff and other invited educators in which issues related to education are interrogated in light of research evidence, and persons will be invited to respond, this initiating conversations about these issues.
- Podcasts: Audio recordings of conversations with stakeholders in education on issues that relate to education in the region. As with most resources produced by CERC, these conversations will be linked to emerging research evidence and will be designed to inform and engage listeners.
- Teachers’ Corner: This is a page on the CERC website prepared specifically for classroom teachers and anyone whose role it is to help learners to acquire knowledge and skills. This page will help teachers to incorporate findings from research in their professional practice. It will invite teachers to share their experiences in doing so with a view to identifying effective practices that can enhance student-learning.
- Ed-Search Caribbean: Perhaps the most exciting feature of the CERC website is the portal to its searchable storage area of research data and publications. This repository is in response to the complaint that research data and publications relating to education in the region are not easy to find. CERC is committed to compiling in a single space, education data and publications such as technical papers, scholarly papers (both academic and professional), conference papers, and theses and dissertations relating to education in the region. Where full-texts are available these will be posted to the repository for easy access; otherwise, links to sources of these resources will be given. We invite you to send us your scholarly works so that we can add them to our collection and make them available to a wide audience. We also invite you to make suggestions of works that would be appropriate for our collection. Feel free to visit Ed-Search Caribbean and if you do not see what you need, let us know. We are happy to expand our collection where possible to meet your needs.
The CERC staff look forward to your comments and support as we develop this website to be a vital part of the educational research landscape in the region.
