Positioning Literate Precarity as Transraciolinguistic Possibility

As North America and the world continue to wrestle with the pervasiveness of literate precarity, the presents and futures of youth beckon our collective consciousness, seeking pathways for hope and for flourishing. Even as a crusade of banned books and challenged classics rages on, there continue to be numerous possibilities for harnessing the peripheral positioning by which we appear to be assailed.

One promising possibility for paddling almost imperceptibly (or not) through precarity is a transraciolinguistic approach. Building on the elements highlighted by a raciolinguistic perspective with a specific emphasis on the implications of ‘individual-to-global analyses’, and functioning in conjunction with insights from diaspora literacy, transnational literacy, and racial literacy, the five elements of a transraciolinguistic approach will be discussed based on how these emerged —èvèk èpi sans white gaze — in the lives and literacies of Black Caribbean immigrant youth reading and writing their transnational worlds.

In turn, practical pathways for using the 3’M’s of this approach — metalinguistic, metacultural, and metaracial understandings — during students’ reading of fictional and non-fictional literature will be presented.

Based on these insights, it is anticipated that teachers will be better able to use a transraciolinguistic approach to support Black immigrant students as well as all youth’s reading of literature via multiple modes. It is also expected that teachers will be able to use a transraciolinguistic approach to transform K-12 standards for the teaching of literature in ways that create relational pathways for hope and for flourishing.

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

"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 U.S. who identify as Black and who migrate to the U.S. from Africa, the Caribbean, or elsewhere. Many students from the Black immigrant population in the US, 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 four 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 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, educators, parents and care givers of Black immigrants both 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 whose engage with the literacies of Black immigrants in U.S. schools.

Bridging the Chasm in Languaging and Literacies: Quantum Imaginaries for Flourishing

The fields of literacy and language are constantly assailed by a pervasive focus on dichotomies. We have spent decades debating whether home language is better than school language, if ‘native’ speakers perform better than ‘non-native’ speakers, why ‘academic literacy’ is more effective than ‘invisible literacy,’ and the list goes on. Yet, there exist possiblities for envisioning languaging and literacies beyond dichotomy via the quantum world, which in turn hold the potential for making visible the underlying impetus for clarifying racialized entanglements of Englishes and peoples.

I argue that "racialized entanglements of Englishes and peoples" when considered from the perspective of quantum physics, can clarify the role of energy in understanding what students do daily with English languaging and across their broader semiotic repertoires.

Exploring energy and vibrational frequency as a basis for such entanglements, this session highlights how linguistic innocence functions as a basis for disrupting dichotomies and facilitating students’ flourishing with Englishes.

Implications are presented for disrupting monoracial, monolinguistic, and monocultural norms in mainstream language and literacy instruction.

Crafting Imaginaries of Critical Awareness: Pedagogical Responsiveness in Teacher Education

Across the globe and in the United States, emphasis continues to be placed on how teachers develop the capacity to meet the needs of culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse students. Specifically, in the United States, clear evidence shows that English language arts and reading (ELAR) teacher educators can play a key role in preparing teachers to address cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity.

Notwithstanding, twenty-first century teacher education programs in and beyond the United States continue to inadvertently reinforce standardized monolingual, monocultural, and monoracial norms in their preparation of English teachers. In turn, there is a daunting expectation that research on diversity in teacher education will change the practices of teachers despite a failure to examine intentionally, the racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity of English language and literacy teacher educators who have been deemed so central to transforming teachers’ ideologies and practices.

To address these concerns, this presentation, undergirded by insights from Black Immigrant Literacies, extends notions of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy as defined by Gloria Ladson-Billings and Django Paris in conjunction with racially and linguistically responsive pedagogy as advanced by Gwendolyn McMillon and Ofelia García respectively, to present the elements of critical multiracial awareness (CMRA), critical multicultural awareness (CMA), and critical multilingual awareness (CMLA) identified in the pedagogical responsiveness of five Black, Hispanic, and White literacy teacher educators (LTEs), two of whom were immigrants to the United States.

The presentation also highlights factors that influenced such awareness, how these forms of awareness shaped educators’ pedagogical responsiveness, and K-12 ELAR teacher receptiveness to this pedagogical shift of teacher educators as they worked with teachers across five schools over the period of one year. Findings based on data from LTEs’ Scholarly Personal Narratives (SPNs) and comprehensive bi-weekly reports, which included a broad array of teacher and student artifacts, showed that teacher educators reflected certain elements of CMRA, CMA, and CMLA as they worked with teachers to support English reading and writing instruction within culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse classrooms.

The audience will learn about factors influencing awareness such as assumptions based on otherness and teaching experience, positioning, observations related to literacy expertise, and discipline. They will also learn about how awareness, in turn, influenced educators’ pedagogical responsiveness as they developed the ability to capitalize on racial, linguistic, and cultural difference. In response, there will be opportunities to explore variability in K-12 teacher receptiveness to teacher educators’ practice. Implications for cultivating awareness in teachers and teacher educators towards racially, culturally, and linguistically just responsiveness will be highlighted.

Literacies of Migration: Translanguaging Imaginaries of Innocence

In this keynote, I paint imaginaries of translanguaging and transsemiotizing leveraged transnationally by Black Caribbean youth across the Caribbean and the US.

The audience will learn about how Black Caribbean youth reflected a full range of literacy practices – six distinct holistic literacies – identified as a basis for flourishing.

These literacies which will be presented, encapsulate numerous examples of how the youth are racialized transgeographically, based on their translanguaging and transsemiotizing with Englishes, both institutionally and individually.

In turn, the book advances a heuristic of semiolingual innocence containing eight elements, informed by the Caribbean youth’s holistic literacies. Through the eight elements presented – flourishing, purpose, comfort, expansion, paradox, originality, interdependence, and imagination – stakeholders and systems will be positioned to better understand and address the urgent needs of these youth.

Ultimately, the heuristic of semiolingual innocence supports a reinscribing of semiolingual innocence for Black Caribbean immigrant and transnational youth as well as for all youth, allowing policy makers across disciplines in both K-12 and higher education to transform the presents and futures of millions of children.