This thesis employs oral history methods to document the educational journey of the interviewer’s mother, contributing to a broader effort to recover and center often unrecorded stories of women’s lives before motherhood. The narratives capture the narrator’s experience in Jamaica before and after the country’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1962. The thesis documents the narrator’s perspective navigating a period of significant social, political, and educational transformation in Jamaica.

The narratives reveal education as a multidimensional process extending beyond formal schooling to encompass moral instruction, language, music, religion, as well as familial and communal responsibility. By situating the narrator’s experiences within a wider historical context, this thesis highlights the enduring significance of maternal knowledge in shaping cultural identity. The existence of the narratives convey the value of providing space for memory work while revealing the mother and daughter dynamic as a valuable entry point into the oral history interview.  

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Tejan Green Waszak, Ph.D is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing Studies and Rhetoric at Hofstra University. She previously lectured in the University Writing Program at Columbia University. Her research interests include Caribbean literature and culture, postcolonial literary studies, writing studies, performance studies, poetry, and oral history. She is co-editor of the anthology Idea of the Human (2016).