From Haiti to Detroit Through Black Immigrant Languages and Literacies

Omogun, Lakeya; Skerrett, Allison

doi:10.1177/1086296x211031279

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Moreover, despite the adoption of Kreyòl as an official language of instruction in Haiti (Prou, 2009), many migrate to the United States from a system of Catholic education that engineered congregational schools whose alienation, racism, autocratic, and violent rule was steeped in Westernization and oppressed as well as marginalized the Vodouist and Creole‐speaking Haitian population (François, 2016). Notwithstanding, Black immigrant Haitian youth have been shown to resist raciolinguistic ideologies, rely on Haitian faith literacies, and use their multiliteracies multiliteracy practices as tools for (re)constructing identity (Bauer & Sanchez, 2020; Omogun & Skerrett, 2021).…”

Section: Intersections Surrounding Black Immigrant Literaciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Black Immigrant Literacies and the Promise of Unbroken Englishes: Five Things Every Teacher Should Know and Can Do

Smith¹

2023

The Reading Teacher

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“Black immigrant literacies” is an intersectional framework that draws from diaspora literacy, racial literacy, and transnational literacy to center race and present teachers with a lens that can support Black immigrant students and their peers' literacies in classrooms. Black immigrant youth can be described as first‐, second‐, or third‐generation immigrants to the United States who identify as Black and who migrate to the United States from Africa, the Caribbean, or elsewhere. Many students from the Black immigrant population, though largely “invisible,” tend to be regarded as a new model minority and as designer immigrants. New model minority perceptions of Black immigrants persist because of claims of immigrant superiority and because Black immigrants have long been perceived as having socioeconomic advantages over their Black American peers. Given that Black immigrants originate primarily from the Caribbean or Africa, accounting for over half of all Black foreign‐born people in the United States, and considering that the Caribbean remains the most common region of birth for the over 4 million Black immigrants in the United States, accounting for almost half of the total, I paint a selective portrait of the intersectionalities surrounding Black immigrant literacies as a basis for teachers to better understand Black immigrant students' needs in classrooms. I also draw specifically from Black Caribbean immigrant literacies to identify and describe five things that every teacher should know and can do when encountering Black Caribbean in English language arts and literacy instruction. Through provisions such as legitimizing “unbroken Englishes,” supporting “translanguaging with Englishes,” cultivating “holistic literacies,” and fostering “local–global connections,” it is anticipated that teachers of Black immigrants in the United States, Caribbean, and beyond will begin to unmask invisibility of this population in their classrooms. Through the use of this framework, it is also expected that teachers will be able to better support all students who engage with the literacies of Black immigrants in United States schools.

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Section: Intersections Surrounding Black Immigrant Literaciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Black Immigrant Literacies and the Promise of Unbroken Englishes: Five Things Every Teacher Should Know and Can Do

Smith¹

2023

The Reading Teacher

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“…Here, we have focused on transborder families’ literacy practices to bring attention to diasporic people's innovative interactions around texts that prepare them to move across incompatible, mononational institutions divided by borders. Borders are “a geopolitical space where colonial difference is embodied and experienced in the literal demarcation and crossing of … boundaries” (Cervantes-Soon & Carrillo, 2016, p. 282), and indeed, there are differential power dynamics across physical borders, border-crossing bodies, and the types of literacy practices engaged in by border crossers across space and time (see also Omogun & Skerrett, 2021). This article, situated in the experiences of families whose lives unfold between Mexico and the United States, uniquely extends critical literacy research through a deterritorialization of mobile families’ literacy practices as they creatively engage with the very texts needed to cross institutional and geopolitical borders to (re)access their children's rights.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Examples of these literacy practices include those used by Chinese immigrants and their communal networks who defied the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 through strategic practices of (in)visibility (Lee, 2005); Mexican migrants carefully tracking the routes, routines, and practices of immigration agents (Minian, 2018); and transborder students detailing the best practices to embody when crossing the U.S.–Mexico border on their way to school (Nuñez & Urrieta, 2021). As Omogun and Skerrett (2021) highlighted in their scholarship on Black immigrants in contexts of anti-Black immigration policies, such as Trump's travel ban for people from Muslim-majority countries in Africa, “not only are these policies deeply rooted in White nationalist and White supremacist ideologies, but they also uphold the racism and xenophobia that have historically characterized the United States” (p. 407). Depending on access to papers and the status of one's family members, individuals develop literacy practices of (in)visibility as they navigate when and how to be recognized by, or remain outside the sight of, government authorities.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A subset of research has centered on how fathers draw upon practices such as advice-giving, humor, and playful rehearsals of racialized surveillance encounters to prepare their children to navigate the world without official papers (Gallo, 2016). These ways of knowing are crucial for transborder children who must navigate shifting racial, linguistic, and cultural borders and institutions, although these families’ pedagogies are rarely recognized or leveraged in their classrooms (Gallo & Ortiz, 2020; Omogun & Skerrett, 2021). We build upon this research through an exploration of transborder families’ literacy practices around acquiring, protecting, and renewing papeles to cross the geopolitical and institutional borders dividing their diasporic lives.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Transborder Literacies of (In)Visibility

Gallo

Adams-Corral

2023

Journal of Literacy Research

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Drawing from an ethnography with mixed-status families residing in Mexico, we examine what we term transborder literacies of (in)visibility, or diasporic people's innovative interactions around texts that prepare them to move across incompatible mononational institutions divided by borders. Through close attention to the literacy practices families engaged in as they applied for their children's U.S. passports from Mexico, we demonstrate how these literacies were not just about expanding authentic ways of reading and writing to include both U.S. and Mexican ways, but instead required unique transborder literacies across mutually unintelligible, racializing mononational systems so that children could (re)access their rights on both sides of the border. We argue that recognizing families’ complex transborder literacy practices of (in)visibility could offer a novel anti-oppressive lens to transform how educators make sense of the complexity of immigrant families’ literacies, movements, and educational supports across borders and national schooling systems.

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“…In contrast to the articles summarised in the previous section, r esearch methods for this group of studies are predominantly qualitative, with a particular emphasis on ethnographic approaches (e.g. Omogun and Skerrett, 2021) and case study (Becker, 2021). Primarily these studies build on collaborations between academics and individual teachers.…”

Section: Literacies As Socially Situated Practices (25 Articles)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Scoping the field of literacy research: how might a range of research be valuable to primary teachers?

Burnett¹

2022

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Literacy research has an important role to play in helping to shape educational policy and practice. The field of literacy research however is difficult to navigate as literacy has been understood and researched in many different ways. It encompasses work from psychology, sociology, philosophy and neuroscience, literary theory, media and literacy studies, and methodologies include a range of qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches. In mapping this complex field, I draw on a systematic ‘scoping survey’ of a sample of peerreviewed articles featuring literacy research relevant to literacy education for children aged 5-11. Studies were deemed relevant if they: addressed literacy pedagogies and interventions; and/or provided pertinent insights (e.g. into children’s experiences of literacy); and/or offered implications for the range and scope of literacy education. The results of this survey are important in two ways. Firstly they help to articulate the range of literacy research and the varied ways that such research might speak to literacy education. Secondly they challenge easy distinctions between paradigms in literacy research. Recognising this complexity and heterogeneity matters given the history of relationships between literacy policy and practice in countries such as England, where polarised debate has often erased the subtle differences of perspective and confluence of interest that this survey illuminates. Based on the results of this survey I argue that an inclusive approach to literacy research is needed in educational contexts. Otherwise alternative and/or complementary ways of supporting children’s literacy learning may be missed, as will important possibilities for literacy education and children’s current and future lives.

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From Haiti to Detroit Through Black Immigrant Languages and Literacies

Cited by 8 publications

References 41 publications

Black Immigrant Literacies and the Promise of Unbroken Englishes: Five Things Every Teacher Should Know and Can Do

Black Immigrant Literacies and the Promise of Unbroken Englishes: Five Things Every Teacher Should Know and Can Do

Transborder Literacies of (In)Visibility

Scoping the field of literacy research: how might a range of research be valuable to primary teachers?

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