Dear Editor,

As Jamaica advances its education transformation agenda, driven by global reforms and locally commissioned reports calling for changes to an ailing system, I recently had cause to celebrate our education system’s accomplishments, particularly our approach to teaching writing composition in higher education.

As I advance my doctoral research on ‘quality education’ and engaged with international writing programme administrators at a summer forum titled ‘It All Starts with Rhetoric: Rhetorical Knowledge as a Foundation of Writing Instruction’, I experienced a striking realisation. Jamaican educators have been perfecting the core knowledge domains of first-year composition in higher education writing programmes internationally for decades.

Our attention to rhetorical knowledge goes far beyond understanding audience, purpose, context, and genre to immersing students in real-life communicative scenarios as an integral part of writing instruction. Authentic activities such as presentations and simulations linked to writing in role come naturally in most classroom engagements, often tasking students with scripting for real audiences, purposes, and contexts. Corresponding student learning outcomes (SLO) are carefully crafted to develop students’ communicative competence as they navigate Jamaica’s unique language situation.

At the teacher-training level, I can attest to the claims of contextualised composition pedagogy. Course outlines feature writing tasks designed around authentic, lived situations so that students develop heightened awareness and practical mastery of the rhetorical knowledge domain.

I was new to the North American writing forum I referenced earlier in this article, but certainly not a novice to the domains of first-year composition. Armed with knowledge and practical application of written composition, I readily supported the call for educators to demystify the rhetorical dimensions of writing by shifting the focus from rigid rules to more student-centred, task-based, and immersive pedagogical approaches.

Joining university and college professors across North America to unpack rhetorical knowledge in writing composition is empowering, but more reassuring is the realisation that we have been teaching writing rhetoric authentically, contextually, and experientially for a long time in Jamaica.

As the discussions on core knowledge domains of first-year composition in higher education advance in subsequent seminars, however, I anticipate that we will fall short on Domain Two, Conventions and Language, as our acceptance of language varieties in academic spaces remains regrettably limited. Our SLOs need to be further aligned with the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ (CWPA) position statement, which maintains that students must understand the value of diverse linguistic histories and practices, recognising them as essential contributors to meaning-making across contexts. No dialect or language is inherently superior; value is shaped by communities and power dynamics.

While international writing programmes encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education, Jamaica still struggles to tolerate our local creole in academia. This tension underscores the need to broaden our pedagogical stance to align with global movements towards more inclusive writing instruction and linguistic justice. I look forward to CWPA’s next session, provocatively titled Whose Rules? Conventions, Language, and Power in the Writing Classroom, where I will join other members of the CWPA to examine the effects of privileging standard English as the singular benchmark for correctness in writing composition.

Covel Hall-Golding

covelah@gmail.com