Patriann Smith

Dr. Patriann Smith, Co-Principal Investigator and USF Project Coordinator of RISE Caribbean, serves as a tenured associate professor at the University of South Florida. Dr. Smith works in conjunction with Principal Investigator — Professor S. Joel Warrican, Project Coordinator – Dr. Coreen Leacock, to build the research capacity and generate high-quality research and publications in the Caribbean Educational Research Center (CERC) by leveraging the expertise of pre-eminent research productive faculty from USF. Through the establishment of the Cross-Cultural Research Mentorship Network (CCRMN) that serves as a basis for the RISE UWI-USF research-practice partnership, Dr. Smith serves as a bridge between the USF Research Mentors, USF Instructional Faculty and UWI CERC Research Fellows and Assistants. She oversees preparations for the implementation of the summer courses taught by USF Instructional Faculty as well as the research mentorship and programming offered by Research Mentors during the annual RISE Summer Institutes and research conferences.

Dr. Smith’s transdisciplinary research considers how literacy teaching, research, assessment, and policy are influenced by the intersection of race, language, and immigration. She examines specifically, how differences in languages, Englishes, and English language ideologies affect Black Caribbean students’ immigrant literacy practices as they cross cultures and languages between their home countries and the United States. She draws from the Black Englishes and Black literacies of Afro-Caribbean immigrants, other Black immigrants in the United States (i.e., African), and Black American students (i.e., African-American) to propose solutions that advance ‘transraciolinguistic justice’. Through her transnationally focused scholarship, Dr. Smith has proposed ‘a transraciolinguistic approach’ to explain how Englishes and the language ideologies that inform the use of these Englishes, both challenge and create affordances for cross-cultural, cross-racial, and cross-linguistic literacy instruction. She has also proposed the framework for ‘Black immigrant literacies’, the concept of ‘translanguaging with Englishes while Black,’ and the notion of ‘raciosemiotic architecture’ to clarify the elements involved in Black youth literacies as their translanguaging is transracialized across borders.

Dr. Smith has published 3 books and over 70 articles and book chapters in journals such as the American Educational Research Journal (AERJ), Reading Research Quarterly (RRQ), Teachers College Record (TCR), Journal of Education and Development in the Caribbean (JEDIC) and International Multilingual Research Journal (IMRJ). She continues to extend her research by comparing insights about Black immigrant Englishes and Black immigrant literacy practices in international literacy assessment and transcultural teacher education to that of other native Black populations in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. An overview of Dr. Smith’s transdisciplinary body of research is available on Google Scholar, ResearchGate and Academia. Her description of a transraciolinguistic approach is available in the Classroom Caffeine podcast and the voicEd Radio podcast.

Dr. Smith currently serves as an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Literacy Research Association (2020-2023) and as Co-Principal Investigator of the $3.6 million USAID funded Caribbean Educational Research Initiative: RISE Caribbean.

Dr. Smith is author of the book “Black Immigrant Literacies: Intersections of Race, Language, and Culture in the Classroom” (2023) and co-author of the book “Affirming Black Students’ Lives and Literacies: Bearing Witness” (2022) published by Teachers College Press.

For more information about Dr. Patriann Smith, please see here.