Patriann Smith – författare

Drawing on the authors’ experiences as Black parents, researchers, teachers, and teacher educators, this timely book presents a multipronged approach to affirming Black lives and literacies. The authors believe change is needed—not within Black children—but in the way they are perceived and educated, particularly in reading, writing, and critical thinking across grade levels. To inform literacy teachers and school leaders, the authors provide a conceptual framework for reimagining literacy instruction based on Black philosophical and theoretical foundations, historical background, literacy research, and authentic experiences of Black students. This important book includes counternarratives about the lives of Black learners, research conducted by Black scholars among Black students, examples of approaches to literacy with Black children that are making a difference, conversations among literacy researchers that move beyond academia; and a model for engaging all students in literacy. Affirming Black Students’ Lives and Literacies advocates for adopting a standard of care that will improve and support literacy achievement among today’s Black students by rejecting deficit presumptions and embracing the fullness of these students’ strengths.Book Features:A counternarrative of Black literacy history, lives, and learners.  Narrative examples of Black literacy scholarship, by Black scholars who embrace their faith-walk as an integral part of their holistic approach to literacy teaching and learning.Discussion questions to spur conversations among school administrators, parents/caregivers, politicians, reading researchers, teacher educators, and classroom teachers. An array of extant Black scholarship that should inform literacy praxis and research. A conceptual framework, CARE, that is applicable for all learners with a focus on Black literacy learners.

Learn how to center, affirm, and develop Black immigrant literacies in ways that allow all youth to engage with and honor their literacies. This book presents a framework to revolutionize teaching in ways that draw on students' assets for redesigning, rethinking, and reimagining literacy and the English Language Arts curriculum. This novel framework has five mechanisms through which Black immigrant literacies and languaging can be better understood: the struggle for justice, the myth of the model minority, transraciolinguistics, the local-global, and holistic literacies. Presenting authentic narratives of Afro-Caribbean youth, the author describes how teachers and educators can: (1) teach the Black literate immigrant; (2) use literacy and English language arts curriculum as a vehicle for instructing Black immigrant youth; (3) foster relations among Black immigrants and their peers through literacy; and (4) connect parents, schools, and communities. The text includes lesson plans, instructional modules, and templates that range in their focus from K–12 to college.Book Features:Details how teachers, curriculum, and instruction can benefit from understanding the experiences of Black immigrant students, and how that experience differs from other Black American students.Highlights authentic narratives that center the holistic voices of Afro-Caribbean immigrant youth from Jamaica and the Bahamas. Demonstrates how students grapple with racialization, becoming immigrants, and the responses of others to their use of Englishes in the United States. Offers research-based methods for teaching all students to draw on their metalinguistic, metacultural, and metaracial understandings in literacy and ELA classrooms.Presents concrete strategies for supporting Black immigrant populations in establishing and sustaining a sense of community across linguistic, cultural, and racial contexts.

This book illuminates emerging perspectives and possibilities of the vibrant schooling and civic lives of Black African youth and communities in the United States, Canada, and globally. Chapters present key research on how to develop and enact teaching methodologies and research approaches that support Black African immigrant and refugee students. The contributors illuminate contours of the Framework for Educating African Immigrant Youth which focuses on four complementary approaches for teaching and learning: emboldening tellings of diaspora narratives; navigating pasts, presence, and futures of teaching and learning; enacting social civic literacies to extend complex identities; and affirming and extending cultural, heritage, and embodied knowledges, languages, and practices. The frameworks and practices will strengthen how educators address the interplay of identities presented by African, and by extension, Black immigrant populations. Disciplinary perspectives include literacy and language, social studies, civics, mathematics, and higher education; university and community partnerships; teacher education; global and comparative education, and after-school initiatives. Book Features:A focus on honoring and affirming the range of youth and community's diverse, embodied, social-civic literacies and lived experiences as part of their educational journey, reframing harmful narratives of immigrant youth, families, and Africa.Chapter authors that include Black African scholars, early-career, and senior scholars from a range of institutions, including in the United States and Canada.Chapters that draw on and extend a range of theoretical lenses grounded in African epistemologies and ontologies, as well as postcolonial and/or decolonizing approaches, culturally relevant and sustaining frameworks, language and literacy as a social practice, transnationalism, theater as social action, transformative and asset-based processes and practices, migration, and emotional capital, and more.A cross-disciplinary approach that addresses the scope and heterogeneity of African immigrant youth racialized as Black and their schooling, education, and civic engagement experiences. Implications are considered for teachers, teacher educators, and community educators.

This book illuminates emerging perspectives and possibilities of the vibrant schooling and civic lives of Black African youth and communities in the United States, Canada, and globally. Chapters present key research on how to develop and enact teaching methodologies and research approaches that support Black African immigrant and refugee students. The contributors illuminate contours of the Framework for Educating African Immigrant Youth which focuses on four complementary approaches for teaching and learning: emboldening tellings of diaspora narratives; navigating pasts, presence, and futures of teaching and learning; enacting social civic literacies to extend complex identities; and affirming and extending cultural, heritage, and embodied knowledges, languages, and practices. The frameworks and practices will strengthen how educators address the interplay of identities presented by African, and by extension, Black immigrant populations. Disciplinary perspectives include literacy and language, social studies, civics, mathematics, and higher education; university and community partnerships; teacher education; global and comparative education, and after-school initiatives. Book Features:A focus on honoring and affirming the range of youth and community's diverse, embodied, social-civic literacies and lived experiences as part of their educational journey, reframing harmful narratives of immigrant youth, families, and Africa.Chapter authors that include Black African scholars, early-career, and senior scholars from a range of institutions, including in the United States and Canada.Chapters that draw on and extend a range of theoretical lenses grounded in African epistemologies and ontologies, as well as postcolonial and/or decolonizing approaches, culturally relevant and sustaining frameworks, language and literacy as a social practice, transnationalism, theater as social action, transformative and asset-based processes and practices, migration, and emotional capital, and more.A cross-disciplinary approach that addresses the scope and heterogeneity of African immigrant youth racialized as Black and their schooling, education, and civic engagement experiences. Implications are considered for teachers, teacher educators, and community educators.

Drawing on the lived experiences of high school-aged young Black immigrants, this book paints imaginaries of racialized translanguaging and transsemiotizing, leveraged transnationally by teenagers across the Caribbean and the United States. The Black Caribbean youth reflect a full range of literacy practices – six distinct holistic literacies – identified as a basis for flourishing. These literacies of migration encapsulate numerous examples of how the youth are racialized transgeographically, based on their translanguaging and transsemiotizing with Englishes, both institutionally and individually. In turn, the book advances a heuristic of semiolingual innocence containing eight elements, informed by the Black immigrant literacies of Caribbean youth. Through the eight elements presented – flourishing, purpose, comfort, expansion, paradox, originality, interdependence, and imagination – stakeholders and systems will be positioned to better understand and address the urgent needs of these youth. Ultimately, the heuristic supports a reinscribing of semiolingual innocence for Black Caribbean immigrant and transnational youth, as well as for all youth.