Patriann Smith, Ph.D.

OVERVIEW

As a Saint Lucian American Professor, I use insights from Black immigrant literacies and Englishes to co-design solutions for transraciolinguistic justice. I work with schools, districts, teachers, students and educational stakeholders, locally, nationally, and internationally, to advance solutions in literacy practice for all youth.

RESEARCH STRAND III

Advancing innovative solutions for transraciolinguistic justice in transculturally responsive teacher education.

There is a need to move beyond race-neutral representations of culturally and linguistically relevant theory for pre-/in-service teachers of literacy and English language arts as well as the literacy teacher educators who support them to identifying and naming how race functions as a basis for the self’s orientation to literacies and also, as a foundation for reinforcing normativity in literacy classrooms. There is a need to also focus on teacher critical multilingual, critical multicultural, and critical multiracial awareness as a basis for advancing culturally and linguistically responsive teacher education. This work is yet to be leveraged in ways that sufficiently advance transraciolinguistic justice.

Advancing this line of research, I have co-authored recent pieces such as the invited book chapter titled “Cultivating critical awareness: Affordances of a transraciolinguistic approach” (Dr. Claudia Finkbeiner & colleagues, Information Age) to illustrate to in-service teachers how gradations of linguistically and culturally responsive practices can support equitable literacy teaching classrooms.

Extending this line of research for practitioners of all students in ways that respond to the call for centering race in literacy teaching and learning (Willis et al., 2021), I have received acceptance for, published and submitted invited works that focus on race and its intersections with nationality and language such as a sole-authored article, “A transraciolinguistic approach for literacy classrooms” published in The Reading Teacher [IF: 1.632].

I continue to extend this line of research focused on practitioners a bit more broadly, through international avenues that address social justice such as the Co-Guest Edited Special Issue titled “Literacy for social justice: Charting equitable global and local practices” published by the United Kingdom Literacy Association’s (UKLA’s) premiere journal, “Literacy.” I am also doing the same through the book in preparation titled, “(Un)Becoming Black/White), (im)migrant and English” to be published under the Creative Commons License of USF.

In broader transnational and transdisciplinary ways, I am continuing to translate my research on the ground through the recent USAID-funded $3.6 million RISE Caribbean (Research Initiative for Supporting Education in the Caribbean) grant received in collaboration with Professor Dr. S. Joel Warrican from The University of the West Indies (UWI) Cave Hill, through which we have established the Caribbean Educational Research Center (CERC) (2021-2024). Through this undertaking, we enlisted two Research Fellows and fifteen Research Assistants working across ten countries in the English-speaking Caribbean.

I have recently completed my coordination of the RISE Caribbean 2023 conference with the support of Drs. Rachel Hatten and Jim Hatten from the David Anchin Center and in collaboration with ISLAC. The conference was held at the USF Patel Center for Global Solutions on May 30-June 1, 2023. I have also recently completed my coordination of the RISE Caribbean 2023 CCRMN Summer Institute held at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill.

Disseminating this practitioner line of research to diverse publics was made possible through invitations from TESOL’s BELPAF where I presented on “(Dis)Entanglements of racialized Englishes and peoples across “Black” and “white” worlds,” national avenues such as the “American Educational Research Association’s (AERA) Writing and Literacies Twitter Chat,” and other international avenues such as the coordinated NJTESOL-NJBE Critical Conversation, “On de-essentializing linguistic Blackness and “Black diasporic possibilities.”

 

ongoing initiatives

RISE CARIBBEAN USAID-Funded Partnership between The UWI Cave Hill & USF 2021-2024

Black Immigrant, African, & African-American Literacies,
2023-

Translanguaging in Black Immigrant Literacies, A Transnational Study
2020-

Teaching Black Immigrant Literacies 2021-