Día de Jamaica
Schools island-wide will be engaged in a number of activities to highlight the theme, share Jamaica’s culture and enhance the experience of students as citizens of Jamaica.
The feature school for this year’s observance is Munro College in St. Elizabeth where the Culture Division team from the Ministry of Culture will extensively promote its Culture Passport programme that allow students free or reduced cost access to heritage sites, cultural institutions such as museums, galleries, theatres and special cultural performances.
Students who are members of the over 200 Culture Clubs operating in schools, and have a passport size photograph can walk away with Culture Passports on Jamaica Day. The process will be managed by the Jamaica Cultural Development
Commission (JCDC), managers of the Culture Club programme in schools and which also manages the Culture Passport programme on behalf of the Ministry of Culture.
The Honourable Olivia Grange, Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, who is scheduled to participate in Jamaica Day activities, is encouraging all Jamaicans to seize the opportunity to embrace the theme for Jamaica Day and visit sites, “the same heritage we invite visitors from abroad to experience, must be so familiar to us that we become ‘tour guides’ for our own children, families and other persons”.
Minister Grange further notes that this year’s partnership with the Ministry of Education is a strategic move to streamline the working relationship between the two Ministries on a number of policy and programmatic initiatives outlined in the revised Culture Policy.
The Culture Passport programme was re-launched October 2017 and is funded by the CHASE Fund, a partnership that will see the Ministry of Culture distributing 50,000 passports between 2017 and 2019. During last year’s re-branding ceremony held at Devon House Heritage site, a number of other groups were formally included in the programme such as the National Council for Senior Citizens; the Jamaica Council for Persons with Disabilities; the Women’s Center of Jamaica; and the Child Development Agency that has oversight for Places of Safety. Community Based Organisations and Churches are also among the institutions to benefit under the programme in the short to medium terms.
In addition to promoting the Culture Passport programme on Jamaica Day, the Ministry will continue its public education programme around Jamaica’s emerging presence in World Heritage, with the recent submission of a nomination dossier for the Sunken City of Port Royal for possible inscription to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2019.
The Ministry will also showcase information pertinent to Kingston’s designation as a UNESCO Creative Music City. There will also be a focus on the Ministry’s Economic Opportunities workshop series that seeks to provide entrepreneurial opportunities to individuals living within the Blue and John Crow Mountains World Heritage site and other named heritage districts.
Publicado en JIS
Thousands of Students to Celebrate Jamaica Day Feb. 23
Thousands of students from educational institutions across Jamaica will celebrate Jamaica Day on Friday, February 23.
Senior Education Officer in the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information and Chairman of the Jamaica Day Planning Committee, Marlon Williams, told JIS News that Jamaica Day 2018 will be observed under the theme ‘Celebrating Jamaica: Nurturing our Natural and Cultural Heritage’.
“Every year the Jamaica Day theme starts with the stem ‘Celebrating Jamaica’, because the Day is all about celebrating Jamaica, land we love. This year’s theme is really to bring about an awareness of Jamaica’s cultural and natural heritage and to encourage not only the students but every single Jamaican here and abroad to protect it,” he said. Mr. Williams explained that schools are allowed to plan activities based on their interpretation of the theme. For example, they may want to highlight practices and ways in which the environment can be protected, or create innovations through technology that can be used to protect aspects of the environment and preserve the cultural heritage. On the day, Principals will introduce the student who is assigned as the culture agent to the school population. This will be followed by the reading of the official Jamaica Day Proclamation at 9:00 a.m.to signal the start of the day’s activities. All radio and television stations are being encouraged to have a student read the proclamation simultaneously with the schools.
The Proclamation can be accessed by logging on to www.moeschools.edu.jm, the Ministry’s portal in the Civic Citizenship and Culture in Education Programme folder.
Mr. Williams said that while the day will be celebrated in all schools, Munro College in St. Elizabeth will be the featured school that will get national attention.
“The boys at Munro College will have on display their innovations depicting the theme, and, through partnerships with several organisations, will showcase these to Jamaica,” he said.
Mr. Williams noted that each educational region will select a focus school, which will lead the Jamaica Day charge in the regions. For Region 1, the focus school will be Golden Spring Primary in Kingston; Region 2, Port Antonio Primary in Portland; Region 3, St. Hilda’s High School, in St. Ann; Region 4, Green Pond High in St. James; and in Region 6, Old Harbour Primary in St. Catherine.
The Ministry has also partnered with the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport in the Culture Passport programme; therefore, the Culture Ministry will be promoting this initiative and issuing culture passports to students on the day. The culture passport allows students access to heritage sites across the country at a discounted cost or free of charge where applicable. Mr. Williams is appealing to Jamaicans here and in the diaspora to don the Jamaican colours – black, green and gold – or bandana on the day to celebrate and show their appreciation for the culture and natural heritage. Jamaica Day, which is part of the Culture in Education programme, was instituted in the nation’s schools by the Ministry of Education in an effort to celebrate what is called ‘Jamaicanness’ and the country’s contribution to the world.