African Immigrant Youth Enacting Rightful Literary Presence

• In Event: Critical Literacy for Racial Justice: Cultivating Equity Through Intersectionality

Abstract

Black African immigrant youth have long demonstrated racial, ethnic, gendered, linguistic, and transnational identities in their literacy practices (Author, 2017; Kiramba et al., 2020). In enacting critical literacy practices, African immigrant youth furthermore complicate urgent questions regarding which students may engage civically in schools and communities (Author, 2014). Given complex contexts of migration, and narrow definitions of literacy instruction, there is a need to identify critical literacy practices associated with African immigrant youth’s identities (see for ex., Pandya, 2019; Smith, 2019), and to design robust research approaches and learning contexts that support African immigrant students’ multifaceted identities and literacy practices across various schooling contexts.

Scholarship rendering visible African immigrant youth’s literacy and language practices and participatory civic engagement (Adenekan, 2021; Author, 2020) is additionally vital at a time when popular-media portrayals reinscribe polarizing deficit accounts of Black immigrant communities (Agyepong, 2018; Author, 2017), and amid complex contexts of anti-Blackness confronting African immigrants in the US and globally (Walls, 2021). Willis et al. (2021), for example, asked how “the field of literacy has responded to race and racism through an examination of equity and racial justice in literacy research” (p. 1). In conversation with Willis and colleagues’ question, we discuss our learning as university-based researchers with youth and teachers in the Diasporas collaborative -- the name given by African immigrant youth to our after-school, participatory, design-based literacy collaboration in the U.S. Midwest.

We aspired in the Diasporas to design and enact research and teaching with Black African immigrant youth that talks back to deficit narratives of Black immigrant youth and their Diasporic literacy practices (Author, 2020). African onto-axio-epistemologies (Author, 2020; Chilisa & Ntseane, 2010; Dei, 2017) informed our research and teaching across 18, 60 to 75-minute online literacy sessions. African immigrant youth in the Diasporas identified, designed, and shared recommendations for critical literacy teaching and learning that affirms their interests and identities. The four paper co-authors comprising the university-based research team co-designed the youth literacy sessions.

For this paper, we discuss our analysis of five youth in the Diasporas who co-designed a virtual “College, Careers, and Community” fair to share their recommendations for literacy teaching and learning across topics youth named as extending their racial and ethnic identities -- anime, African dance, preparing a communal meal, entrepreneurship, and soccer. We detail how African immigrant youth in the Diasporas demonstrated what we have theorized as “rightful literary presence” -- youth “historicized, contextualized, affirmed, and extended” possibilities for research and teaching with their already-present critical literacy practices (Author, 2021). We thus extend perspectives of Squire and Darling (2013) in critical geographies and Calabrese Barton, Kim, and Tan (2020) in informal STEM learning of notions of “rightful presence,” through which immigrant communities and Black youth engage in “making present” (Squire & Darling, 2013, p. 59) practices to publicly demonstrate their complex contexts and histories of migration, racial and ethnic identities.

We conclude with implications for research, teaching including participatory curriculum design, and teacher education with African immigrant youth, toward conceptualizing and enacting rightful literary presence as a stancetaking toward justice.

Authors

• Vaughn W.M. Watson, Michigan State University

• Joel E. Berends, Michigan State University

• Alecia D. Beymer, University of Cincinnati

• Lauren Elizabeth Reine Johnson, University of Illinois at Chicago