Nigerian Immigrant Youth Negotiating Racial, Linguistic, and Cultural Identities in the United States

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 3:35 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Language, Social Capital, and Power in Education (Table 1)

Abstract

This study is a work in progress that aims to contribute to the scholarship on African immigrant youth. It centers the voices of immigrant youth and positions them as agentic in the creation of their identities. The findings from this study will have implications for how Nigerian immigrant students view themselves and articulate their identities, additionally it extends to teacher understandings of Black immigrant students and the teacher education programs as whole as they develop teachers’ global cultural competencies. Findings from this study point to some challenges that newly arrived African immigrant children face, such as how they cope with a new racial, social and linguistic positioning in their US schools and society at large.

Author

• Laura Obubo, University of Missouri