Patriann Smith, Ph.D.

ABOUT MY RESEARCH

My transdisciplinary research agenda emerges at the intersection of race, language, and immigration. As a Saint Lucian American scholar-mother-educator, I describe the cross-linguistic, cross-racial, and cross-cultural experiences of immigrants transracialized as Black in literacy learning, instruction, and assessment to clarify the culturally, racially, and linguistically responsive literacy and assessment practices for reaching underserved youth.

Specifically, I examine how differences in Black Englishes and in dominant English language ideologies affect the literacies of Black Caribbean immigrant adolescents, teachers, and teacher educators as they cross cultures and languages between their home countries and the United States.

I translate insights from this transdisciplinary scholarship on Black literacies and Englishes, and their corresponding language ideologies into practice by creating avenues for anti-racist and transraciolinguistically just instruction and assessment in language and literacy teacher education.

I have proposed notions such as “a transraciolinguistic approach” (Smith, 2019, 2020) and the framework for “Black immigrant literacies” (Smith, 2020) as well as conceptions such as “transraciolinguistic justice” (Smith, 2022), “quantum racialized entanglements” of Englishes and peoples” (Smith, 2022) and “raciosemiotic architecture” (Smith, 2022) to explain how standardized English, and the language ideologies that inform the use of these Englishes, both challenge and create affordances for raciolinguistic justice in literacy teaching.

I continue to extend my transdisciplinary research by comparing insights about Black Caribbean immigrant Englishes and literacies to that of other native Black populations in the United States, Africa, and Britain.

Quantum Racialized Entanglements of Languages/Englishes and Peoples (Smith, 2021, 2022)

I also continue to do so by demonstrating how teaching for racial justice can be used by language and literacy pre-service and in-service teachers as well as teacher educators to address the needs of linguistically diverse students.

My research program involves three interrelated strands:

1. Re-envisioning literacy and language as multilingual, multicultural, and multiracial through the lens of the Black immigrant;
2. Clarifying and addressing cultural, linguistic, and racial inequities in international literacy assessment;
3. Advancing innovative solutions for transculturally responsive teacher education.

Speaking

Keynote, University of North Carolina Greensboro, 2023 Racialized Englishes: A Call for Solidarity through Asian-American and Black Englishes and Literacies Greensboro, NC

American Educational Research Association Conference, 2023
RISE Caribbean
Chicago, IL

World Literacy Summit, 2023
Translanguaging with Black Immigrant Literacies
Oxford, UK

American Association for Applied Linguistics, 2023
Quantum Racialized Entanglements of Englishes and Peoples
Portland, OR

Literacy Research Association, 2022 Racialized Entanglements for Transraciolinguistically Just Methodological Research Phoenix, AZ

University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, 2021 Preparing Anti-Racist Language Teachers for Diverse Classrooms: A Transraciolinguistic Approach. Philadelphia, PA