Roberto Germán [00:00:01]:
Welcome to Our Classroom. In this space, we talk about education, which is inclusive of, but not limited to what happens in schools. Education is taking place whenever and wherever we are willing to learn. I am your host, Roberto Germán, and Our Classroom is official.
Roberto Germán [00:00:28]:
Welcome back to Our Classroom. Today we have Dr. Patriann Smith, a distinguished scholar and educator specializing in language, literacy and exceptional education. Her research focuses on the intersection race, language and immigration, with an emphasis on culturally, racially, and linguistically responsive literacy and assessment practices. She is the author of the book Black Immigrant Literacies, intersections of race, language, and culture in the classroom with us today. Dr. Smith, welcome.
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:01:10]:
Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be here.
Roberto Germán [00:01:13]:
Well, it's great to have you here. I appreciate it. I know you've been working hard on your book, and we celebrate you for this accomplishment and looking forward to hearing from you as I've been scanning through the book and trying to understand what it is that you're putting out into the world. And I think to some degree I do. But there are certain things that I would love you to unpack further, and I know it will be beneficial for our audience. So let's go ahead and dig in. The book delves into the concept of literacies. Can you explain what you mean by Black Immigrant Literacies and how they differ from more traditional understandings of literacy?
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:01:58]:
Thank you. So when I talk about Black Immigrant Literacies, I typically am talking about the framework itself, right. To Black Immigrant Literacies. I articulate it as a framework. But if we're thinking about the real nuance, the literal meaning of Black Immigrant Literacies, what I'm really talking about is how does this notion of literacy as meaning making, literacy as a social practice, as articulated by scholars like Brian street? What does that actually look like when you have a student who is Black or racialized as Black, who is immigrant or transnational, and who's also having that notion of foreignness attached to their personhood, what does it actually look like for them to make meaning based on race, based on language, based on culture? Right. With migration, and so these three constructs intersecting, we think about how does that change literacy from being one singular sort of notion of what literacy is to this plural notion? We've seen it articulated in multi literacies with the new London group. Right. We've seen it articulated in social literacy practices with Brian street, we've seen how critical literacy that requires reading the word and the world has allowed us the work of freire through extensions by Alett Willis and Alan Luke to think about just how literacy moves beyond text and beyond specific linguistic burdens, to the broader semiotics that it entails.
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:03:34]:
But with Black Immigrant Literacies, we're saying that we're decentering a monolingual, monocultural, and monoracial norm. We are articulating literacies as a function of race, language, and immigration in its very basic or foundational state. And so that is one of the key messages of Black Immigrant Literacies. And its intersectionality from the research of Kimberly Crenshaw, allows us to think about literate practice not as a singular element, but as its intersectional notion.
Roberto Germán [00:04:13]:
That's great. I noticed that on page 39, because you just mentioned the term framework when you started your response on page 39. It gets into the Black Immigrant Literacies framework, and it consists of five elements. Can you state the five elements and their significance to the framework?
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:04:34]:
Of course. So there are five elements of the framework, and these five elements are very important to how I came to think about Black Immigrant Literacies from the research of Black students who were immigrants and transnationals, Black educators who were also immigrants, and transnationals, and Black teachers. So from that amalgamation of research, I sort of saw how five elements were actually occurring within the data and the analyses of what students and educators and teachers were doing. And these five elements are laying claim to the struggle for justice. I realized that there was a tendency sometimes to think that Black immigrant populations did not necessarily need to identify with the struggle for justice. But given the fact that they are racialized in the United States, that is very important for them to be able to do, to share in that broader notion of what does it mean to advocate for racialized, and particularly for Black peoples in the United States and across the diaspora. The second element is challenging the myth of the model minority. I noticed in the data coming out of that was this notion of exceptionalism and raci linguistic exceptionalism as defined by H.
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:05:54]:
Samy Alim , that this wanting to have Black immigrants portray a notion of how they were racialized and linguistized in ways that made them superior to certain other Black people. In many cases, those Black people tend to be African Americans. And so I challenge this notion of a certain Black person becoming elevated in the way we think about literacy, in the way we think about languaging in the US, and showing that every Black person is implicated in this notion of how we fight for justice. The third element is creating opportunities for a transracial linguistic approach. And, of course, that notion comes out of a racial linguistic perspective by Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores, where they talk about institutional as well as individual analyses that we need to use to address race and language being intertwined. And so I talk about how a transracial linguistic approach allows us to see the metal linguistic, metacultural, and meta racial understandings that these Black immigrant youth presented in the United States that caused them to be capable of being able to maneuver some of the linguistic practices that in many cases, sometimes a lot of the dominant populations may not necessarily be privy to. The fourth element is creating, is rethinking local and global connections. And in that element, I talk about how when these individuals who are racialized as Black, they are in the United States, they get to think about the local experiences that they're now having in light of the global experiences and the colonization that actually was occurring in their home countries in relation to what it looks like in the United States.
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:07:52]:
So there is that sort of tension that they are beginning to see if they are able to tap into the racial literacy that is part of this framework. And then the last element that I talk about is repurposing literacies as holistic. So we tend to have a fragmented view of what students are. And I saw that coming through the data. Black immigrant students would actually have academic literacy, know sort of this better capacity that they can demonstrate versus other home practices that we call them. But Nelson Flores and others have taught us about language architecture and the ways that students manipulate language across home and school, and bridging those dichotomies become so important. And so that holistic literacy that I'm arguing for, it's ways of meaning making that Black immigrant students bring that help us to see what does this look like with other populations as well. So all of these elements come together, and they give us the sense of how do we think about literate practice from another perspective, a perspective that literacy, from its foundational inception.
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:09:05]:
I teach the history of reading courses across many universities, and I have not seen this kind of understanding emerging through that body of literature. It decenters the monolingual, monocultural, and monoracial norms.
Roberto Germán [00:09:24]:
That's a lot there. There was one particular thing that you mentioned that's resonating with me, and it's when you were talking about connecting the now local experience with the global experience, because there is a tension that folks wrestle with there, and sometimes it's one that goes ignored. But I think there's room for us to dive deeper into that conversation and what's happening and how we make meaning based on the experiences that we have, but also based on what's already been constructed that needs to be, as you said, decentered or deconstructed?
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:10:03]:
Yes, definitely.
Roberto Germán [00:10:06]:
So nowadays, when we think about and hear the word entanglement, what comes to mind for many people are Jada Pickett Smith, Will Smith, and August Alicena. However, in your book, you write entanglements of English's race and migration. Can you elaborate on this?
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:10:33]:
Thank you so much for asking. Last year, when I first presented on entanglements, it's funny, because I had Will Smith and Jada Pinkett on the slides. And that's what we think about, right? When we think about entanglement, we always think, Jada Pinkett, Will Smith. So when I got to this notion of entanglement, it was, again, looking at the data of Black immigrant youth, Black educators. Right. I was seeing that a lot of what I was examining with the Englishes that they were using was telling me that they were deeply embedded with the languaging practices that they had. So it was the person here, the language practice here, but they were so interconnected and interwoven that it's difficult to do what I call disentangle them from each other. And so Alistair Pennycook gave this notion of entanglements of Englishes.
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:11:34]:
And so I used his idea of entanglements of English to think about how racialized Englishes engage with the body. And then because those Englishes are racialized and engaging with the body, the body is positioned in different ways, depending on the local or the global context that it's in, right. And so entanglements of Englishes has to do with thinking about the racialization of Black immigrant students. And then, by extension, what does this mean for a student racialized, that's Black, or student racialized in other ways, that's other people of color who are engaging with ways of meaning making in classrooms in the United States. The other thing I want to point out with entanglements is that even though there's this deep interconnection between the body, the racialized body, and the languaging practices or the semiotics that students engage with, there is also a space between the two, between the body, and between the language that allows for shifting. So depending on what you're doing as a student, you're always shifting how your entanglements are actually occurring. It's never static. I think what we've done, though, with research, is we've approached it as though it's static, but these entanglements are always shifting.
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:12:57]:
I see. Recently, Leeway talked about transpositioning. But in a piece that I wrote in 2019, I talked about how Jada a Black immigrant and transnational youth was repositioning her hybridity and fluidity of her practices and moving from space to space with different ways of showing her entanglement. And then I asked, what does that mean for teachers who then realize that there is no static approach to how these students will leverage these entanglements in their classrooms?
Roberto Germán [00:13:29]:
That's good stuff right there, folks. Read up on these entanglements. All right, this is entanglement worth exploring and reading about the St. Gossip column. All right, we're talking about research and literacy practices here. I want to ask you one of the questions to consider from chapter five of your book. What text sets should be required across all schools so that children, including Black immigrant students, have access to a wide range of multimodal literature that allows them to see various representation of multiple Black immigrant populations portrayed authentically in a legitimate way?
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:14:15]:
Thank you so much for asking that question, because I always think about how does this deeply theoretical work resonate with teachers, right? What can they do with this on a Monday morning when they get into the classroom? How can they use this? What can they actually do in classrooms? And one of the things that teachers can do is tap into the literature that is allowing them to show students a bigger, broader world or to have them see themselves reflected in books. One of the lists that I present in my book is actually available as a supplementary file. It's a Black Immigrant Literacies literature list that is available on teachers College Press website, and I will attach it, hopefully, to this podcast so that everyone can have direct access to this free resource. A second text set that I would like to recommend is books about the immigrant experience, developed in collaboration with the USF libraries librarian Susan Aryu. So we worked together to curate this list and to put it together so that all teachers can actually have a space. Again, this is a free resource to see not just Black immigrant students, but also other types of immigrant students, students who are actually all engaging in many cases with multiple and overlapping identities that don't necessarily just reflect Blackness, but other ethnicities as well, and races. And then a third tech set that I've curated or that I have accessed, which I think is really great, is the Lemon College Library's Black Immigrant literacies website, which also has other immigrant populations and literature that teachers can use as well. One of my favorites is Auntie Lucy's talking paintings, and it talks about a haitian student's visit to her aunt's house.
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:16:17]:
So I just really would like to ask teachers to look at these resources, and definitely for schools and districts to be more intentional about foregrounding what Black immigrants get to see in classrooms.
Roberto Germán [00:16:33]:
Thanks for those recommendations. I want to keep us in the classroom. 08:00 a.m. Monday morning what are some specific strategies and practices that educators can implement to better support Black immigrant students in the classroom, taking into account their unique literacies and cultural backgrounds?
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:16:52]:
Definitely, and I present a wide range of resources in my book, lots of figures, very practical orientations that can be used. But I want to talk about two or three of these this afternoon. And the first one that I want to talk about is mechanisms for decentering the monocultural, monolingual and monoracial norms. Nelson Flores Jonathan Rosa, in a raci linguistic perspective, talk about needing to focus on the structures and systems as we focus on the individuals in Our Classrooms. Right. And I think that that motivated me to think about ways that we can identify the decentering process. How can we locate it in what's happening on a Monday morning? Well, maybe it won't be happening on a Monday morning because you're going to have to plan for some of this. Right.
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:17:47]:
But teachers who are interested in doing this, I show them how to take the standards and to use the cultural, monolingual, monoracial notions and to revise the standards so that it reflects multilingualism. It reflects multiculturalism and it reflects multiracialism. So I definitely recommend that teachers take a look at that heuristic or matrix because it allows you to see exactly how, or to get a sense of how to do that with your standards. And then the second one I want to talk about is creating storylines with the three M's. Creating storylines with the three Ms allows teachers to actually work with students who are Black and who are immigrants or who are immigrants of color so that they can focus on creating responses that let them tap into their metal linguistic, metacultural and metiracial understanding. A lot of students have assets, but they don't know they have assets. It's our duty or responsibility, rather, as teachers to help them to see those assets that they do possess. And so this particular instance allows us to ask students questions and to create multimodal or written responses that refer to how they think about how they speak, how they think about how they write, how they think about how they look, how they think about how others respond to how they look.
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:19:10]:
And that really gets at the meta understandings, I call it, right? Moving beyond just the knowledge level to the thinking about how I think about race, the thinking about how I think about language, and the thinking about how I think about culture. And so that part of the process allows students to get their understandings on paper or in a video, and then the responses are discussed among the students and the teachers, and then it's created and curated so that it can be shared with schools, and schools can then use it to revise the ways that they are presenting content and instruction in the classroom. So I just want to say that there are lots of other approaches in the book, so please do get your copy and do reach out as you try these in your classroom.
Roberto Germán [00:20:00]:
That's great. And I love the fact that students are incorporated in that process because their voice matters, their feedback matters. And as we are working with our students, it's a way to empower them to give them some ownership of how it is that we facilitate their education. So what are the key takeaways from your book that you hope educators, policymakers, and the general public will gain from reading it?
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:20:30]:
I think if I were to sum it up in one sentence, I would say that literacy is now literacy, period. Right. There is no longer literacy. There is only literacies, period. And I think what has happened is we have two pathways right now, or two streams of consciousness flowing in our schools and in our scholarships. You have those that are focused on literacies over here and those that are focused on literacy over here. And I am here to say that there is no longer literacy. It's only literacy, period.
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:21:09]:
And why do I say this? I say this because the majority populations emerging in the United States understand this. Right. Our multilingual, multicultural, and multiracial practices are leading us to the space where that is all that students are going to eventually begin to need to rely on. In fact, I argue in my work that dominant populations will actually be at a deficit because this is the future. And so what I really want to leave with everyone is that disentering these norms, monolingual, monocultural, and monoracial norms, is part of the future, and we can decide to get on board with it or we can be left behind.
Roberto Germán [00:22:00]:
That's right. We're going plural, people. Literacies, plural. All right. If you had an opportunity to have lunch with anybody that are alive, who would it be and why?
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:22:15]:
I thought a lot about this question, and I have to say that it is our Lord. I normally give credit to God when I am speaking openly because he walks with me, he talks with me, he infuses my spirit. And I would love to be able to sit down with him and ask him a bunch of questions, or her or whoever they are. Right? But that God factor in my life, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. I would love to be able to sit down and have lunch with the Lord, and I look forward very much to being able to do that at some point, no matter what that might look like in an eternity.
Roberto Germán [00:22:54]:
Sure, that would be a great conversation. To those that are listening, what is a message of encouragement you want to offer them?
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:23:07]:
I want to say that we are in some very troubling times. I live in Florida, and a lot of teachers are under a lot of very challenging situations. But I want to say that we must keep the faith that there is a future that we are creating for our children and that we will come through this, all of us, by focusing on literacies and languaging and semiotics that students actually do need to flourish and survive. We will all get through this together.
Roberto Germán [00:23:44]:
Yes. Shout out to all the Florida educators, especially the k twelve folks and university. Also keep pressing forward, keep fighting the good fight. Have the difficult conversations. Do not be deterred from doing the work. We here, too, we're in Florida, so we understand this is a but happy, happy to be pushing forward with folks like you, Dr. Smith. Now for those that want to learn more about your work, want to connect with you, where can they follow you? And also, where can people purchase the book?
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:24:22]:
Yes. So if you'd like to learn more about my work, my teaching, my research, definitely follow me on Twitter at Patriann Smith. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, again at Patriannsmith, on Facebook, again at Patriann Smith. My website, patrionsmith.com. I've tried to curate as much as possible a broad range of resources for teachers, scholars, educators, policymakers. So definitely take a look at my website. And please, folks, get my book, Black immigrant literacy, intersections of race, language, and culture in the classroom, teachers College press website and also Amazon and so many other bookstores around the world. So please get your copy, reach out to me and let me know what you think.
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:25:12]:
And I'm looking forward to hearing more about how you think about the constructs and also the practices that I present in my book.
Roberto Germán [00:25:21]:
Well, Dr. Smith, thank you for your time. We appreciate you and really looking forward to learning more about this topic. Black Immigrant Literacies. Your book is deep. There's so much there. In the past couple of days, I was just like, man, where am I going to focus my attention? Where am I going to center the questions? Because there's so much to unpack there. So appreciate the work that you put into developing this book.
Roberto Germán [00:25:55]:
Black immigrant literacy's intersection of race, language, and culture in the classroom and look forward to continuing to build with you.
Dr. Patriann Smith [00:26:06]:
Thank you so much for having me, Roberto, and take good care. I appreciate all the work you're doing. Keep the fight, keep the faith.
Roberto Germán [00:26:16]:
That's right. Take care.
Roberto Germán [00:26:20]:
As always, your engagement in Our Classroom is greatly appreciated. Be sure to subscribe, rate the show, and write a review. Finally, for resources to help you understand the intersection of race, bias, education, and society, go to multicultural classroom peace and love from your host, Roberto Germán.
