Patriann Smith, Ph.D.

OVERVIEW

As a Saint Lucian American Professor of literacy at USF, I use my transdisciplinary lens surrounding Black immigrant literacies and Englishes to advance transraciolinguistically just solutions for international literacy assessment.

RESEARCH STRAND II

Addressing intersectionally motivated inequities that persist based on transraciolinguicized injustice in international literacy assessment.

There is a continued need to emphasize how racialized languaging is instantiated in interpretations of the large-scale Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) of reading literacy that are crucial to countries’ literate representations of linguistically diverse adolescent youth. Extending my focus on this need to consider how race intersects with language, influencing notions of reading and literacy achievement for Black youth, I have collaboratively examined such racialization and identified corresponding insights that reinforce the need for equitable understandings of (Black) youth’s literacies based on assessment.

One example of this is presented in the co-authored article, “Cultural alloys and heterogenous mixes: Contextualized and comparative language differences in the literacy assessment of U.S. and Canadian youth,” which I coordinated with several colleagues across multiple universities in the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean and which was recently published in Research in Comparative and International Education [IF: 1.50].

I am in the process of continuing collaborations with quantitative research methodologist, Dr. Yi-Hsin Chen, at USF, to undertake the studies, “Situating immigrant reading literacy performance within an international context: How do immigrants in countries worldwide compare?” for Educational Researcher [IF: 3.386] and “Black immigrant reading literacy performance: How do other immigrant and American peers compare?” for the American Educational Research Journal [4.861], the research presentations for which have been presented at AERA 2023.

Funding to support this line of research will be explored through resubmission of the grant proposal, “Towards a rationale for rethinking Black student achievement in United States schools” to the William T. Grant Foundation” [$50,000].

BLOGS

Why Eurocentric literacy measures may be creating the illusion that Black students are underperforming. London School of Economics and Political Science United States American Politics and Policy (LSE USAPP) Blog, 2020

Why for Black speakers, despite what they are told, using ‘Standard English’ will not lead to acceptance. London School of Economics and Political Science United States American Politics and Policy (LSE USAPP) Blog, 2020

Renewing hope with Englishes: Insights from middle schoolers. Literacy Today, 2018