Educating African Immigrant Youth: Schooling and Civic Engagement in K-12 Schools

This book illuminates emerging perspectives and possibilities of the vibrant schooling and civic lives of Black African youth and communities in the United States, Canada, and globally. Chapters present key research on how to develop and enact teaching methodologies and research approaches that support Black African immigrant and refugee students. The contributors examine contours of the Framework for Educating African Immigrant Youth, which focuses on four complementary approaches for teaching and learning: emboldening tellings of diaspora narratives; navigating the complex past, present, and future of teaching and learning; enacting social civic literacies to extend complex identities; and affirming and extending cultural, heritage, and embodied knowledges, languages, and practices. The frameworks and practices will strengthen how educators address the interplay of identities presented by African and, by extension, Black immigrant populations. Disciplinary perspectives include literacy and language, social studies, civics, mathematics, and higher education; university and community partnerships; teacher education; global and comparative education; and after-school initiatives.

Book Features:

• A focus on honoring and affirming the range of youth and community’s diverse, embodied, social-civic literacies and lived experiences as part of their educational journey, reframing harmful narratives of immigrant youth, families, and Africa.
• Chapter authors that include Black African scholars, early-career, and senior scholars from a range of institutions, including in the United States and Canada.
• Chapters that draw on and extend a range of theoretical lenses grounded in African epistemologies and ontologies, as well as postcolonial and/or decolonizing approaches, culturally relevant and sustaining frameworks, language and literacy as a social practice, transnationalism, theater as social action, transformative and asset-based processes and practices, migration, and emotional capital, and more.
• A cross-disciplinary approach that addresses the scope and heterogeneity of African immigrant youth racialized as Black and their schooling, education, and civic engagement experiences. Implications are considered for teachers, teacher educators, and community educators.

Vaughn W. M. Watson is an associate professor of English education at Michigan State University. Michelle G. Knight-Manuel is dean of Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver. Patriann Smith is associate professor of literacy studies at the University of South Florida.