The Division of Virgin Islands Cultural Education

03/09/2026

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26/08/2026

The Division of Virgin Islands Cultural Education was pleased to support St. Croix Educational Complex educator Sayeeda Carter and her students during an interdisciplinary learning experience that moved across Frederiksted and demonstrated what place-based Virgin Islands education can look like in practice.

Ms. Carter, who teaches ELA and drama, continues to create learning experiences that connect Virgin Islands history and culture with literature, performance, environmental science, visual art, architecture, agriculture, and the wider Caribbean experience. This interdisciplinary approach reflects the purpose of the Kallaloo Framework, the Virgin Islands Cultural Standards, which encourages educators to place Virgin Islands experiences within and across subject areas rather than treating culture as an isolated area of study.

At the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts, students experienced Our Soil, Beyond Materiality, an exhibition connecting soil, scientific inquiry, ecology, history, and artistic expression. Students examined soils connected to St. Croix and Puerto Rico, explored the processes through which soil can become artistic pigment, and created artwork using materials originating from the land itself.

The learning continued at Fort Frederik, where Virgin Islands Territorial Curator Monica Marin invited students to reconsider how we describe the built environment of the Virgin Islands. Drawing upon questions advanced through the work and legacy of the late Gerville Larsen, students were encouraged to examine familiar descriptions such as “Danish architecture” and consider the African and Afro-Creole craftspeople, builders, tradesmen, laborers, and knowledge systems that transformed architectural ideas into the physical towns and structures that remain with us today.

This conversation is particularly important for young Virgin Islanders because terminology influences historical understanding. Whether future scholarship settles upon language such as Afro-Creole, Danish-Creole, or another framework, students should understand that they have the intellectual capacity to question historical terminology, examine evidence, and participate in how Virgin Islands history is interpreted.

At Sejah Farm, students extended those conversations into agriculture, waterways, food systems, environmental stewardship, drought, biodiversity, and climate change. These are immediate Virgin Islands concerns, connecting cultural knowledge with the scientific and economic questions students will encounter as future farmers, environmental professionals, business owners, policymakers, preservationists, engineers, artists, and community leaders.

Students also engaged with St. Croix-born choreographer and arts leader Paloma McGregor, whose artistic practice draws deeply from memory, movement, community, and the fishing traditions of her father. McGregor, a former member of the internationally recognized Urban Bush Women dance company and co-founder and Executive Artistic Director of Angela’s Pulse, demonstrated another form of cultural knowledge: the body as a vessel through which memory, environment, family history, and place can be investigated and expressed.

Across a single learning experience, students encountered ELA, drama, environmental science, visual art, architecture, history, agriculture, movement, climate literacy, and cultural memory, with St. Croix serving as the connective text.

This is an important principle of the Kallaloo Framework. Virgin Islands culture can provide the foundation through which students investigate multiple disciplines while simultaneously understanding their relationship to the Caribbean and the wider world.

DVICE remains grateful to educators who create these opportunities and to the museums, cultural practitioners, artists, farmers, historians, and community partners who open their spaces and share their expertise with Virgin Islands students. Knowledge moves in both directions when schools and communities work together, and each collaboration strengthens our collective capacity to prepare young Virgin Islanders to understand the places they will eventually be responsible for stewarding.

17/08/2026

17/08/2026

A special thank you to Anuri Oliver and the Virgin Islands Architecture Center for Built Heritage and Crafts for participating in DVICE's summer Educational Translation Model and for bringing an important perspective to our educators: a building can be read as a historical document.

Through VIAC's work with the Old Barracks on Hospital Street in Christiansted, Anuri demonstrated how material culture and the built environment can help teachers and students investigate Virgin Islands history. The Old Barracks complex has existed for approximately three centuries and has served different purposes across generations, including as a hospital, residence, police station, public high school, and government offices. Its walls, materials, architectural changes, uses, and surrounding landscape therefore hold evidence of the people, labor systems, institutions, technologies, and historical events that shaped Christiansted.

That approach gives historical preservation a different kind of meaning for students. A historic structure is evidence. Students can examine what materials were used, where those materials came from, who possessed the knowledge and skilled labor to construct the building, how the structure changed over time, and what those changes reveal about the society surrounding it. Architecture can therefore become an entry point into Virgin Islands History, material culture, mathematics, engineering, environmental science, economics, skilled trades, art, and historical inquiry.

VIAC is also helping cultivate a new generation of historians and cultural stewards, something deeply aligned with what DVICE hopes to develop among our own students. Anuri herself has been part of VIAC's Old Barracks Storytelling research team, working alongside historians and researchers to compile research, narratives, and oral histories surrounding the property and the people connected to it.

The significance of the Old Barracks project has also been recognized nationally. VIAC received a Save America's Treasures grant to begin rehabilitation of Building 2, part of its larger vision to transform the property into an educational center for historic preservation, architecture, and the building arts. The Mellon Foundation subsequently gave to support planning and design for community and cultural heritage spaces at the site.

This is the work DVICE is advancing through our Educational Translation Model: bringing educators together with the institutions and practitioners who steward Virgin Islands knowledge and translating that expertise into standards-aligned methodologies, activities, lesson plans, and resources that teachers can put to work with students.

We thank Anuri Oliver and VIAC for coming to the table with us this summer, for investing in the next generation of Virgin Islands knowledge keepers, and for reminding us that our historic buildings do not sit silently. When students learn how to examine them, their materials, craftsmanship, transformations, and the human labor embedded within them become another archive through which Virgin Islands history can be investigated, understood, and carried forward.

17/08/2026

A special thank you to Kaden Groupy, Education Assistant with the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts (CMCA), and Jessica Parker White, CMCA’s Education Coordinator, for their continued participation in DVICE’s Educational Translation Model and for helping strengthen the relationship between our cultural institutions and Virgin Islands classrooms.

Throughout the summer, CMCArts participated in our Educational Translation meetings, working with DVICE to explore how the museum’s exhibitions, artists, research, and community programming can be translated into methodologies and resources that support teachers and students across multiple academic disciplines.

During our recent professional development, Kaden shared Our Soil, Beyond Materiality, curated by Alexandra Santos, demonstrating how an arts-based project can become a point of entry into science, ecology, literature, social studies, and fine arts. Through the exhibition’s exploration of soil, environment, material, place, and Caribbean identity, educators could consider how observation and artistic interpretation can lead students into scientific inquiry and deeper questions about land and our relationship with the natural environment.

The educational possibilities align across several areas of instruction: science standards through ecosystems, soil systems, biodiversity, and human impacts on the environment; English Language Arts standards through evidence-based observation, interpretation, discussion, research, and writing; and Visual Arts standards through material investigation, artistic processes, interpretation, and the relationship between art and the environments from which it emerges. The project also creates opportunities for social studies inquiry into land, agriculture, community history, and the ways Virgin Islanders have interacted with and understood their physical environment.

This interdisciplinary approach is at the heart of the DVICE Educational Translation Model, which creates reciprocal pathways between the knowledge held within our communities and the pedagogical expertise of our educators. Cultural institutions bring their research, collections, artists, and specialized knowledge to the table, while DVICE and educators work with partners to translate that knowledge into standards-aligned methodologies, activities, lesson plans, and resources that can be readily used with students.

We especially thank Jessica, CMCA’s Education Coordinator, for her continued commitment to this partnership and for ensuring that CMCA has remained engaged throughout our summer Educational Translation work, and we thank Kaden Groupy for bringing that work directly to our educators during professional development.

DVICE continues to advocate for museums, heritage organizations, cultural institutions, artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners to become sustained partners within our school system through teacher training, instructional resources, classroom activities, and meaningful learning experiences for Virgin Islands students.