ERIC Number: EJ1469124
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-May
Pages: 12
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1081-3004
EISSN: EISSN-1936-2706
Available Date: 2024-11-12
Translating Blackness through Youth Language Learning in the Dominican Republic
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, v68 n6 p608-619 2025
This article presents findings from a six-month Language and Social Justice course collaboratively designed with multilingual educators in the Dominican Republic. Teaching and learning processes with Dominican and Haitian youth (ages 18-24) illustrate how opportunities to learn about English and Kreyòl from a transnational perspective can disrupt dominant discourses about youth's relationships with themselves and each other. By intentionally focusing on counternarratives to notions that Dominican youth reject their Blackness and that Dominican and Haitian youth interact in tension rather than solidarity, this study highlights how youth "translate blackness" (García Peña, 2022) through language learning. Drawing from transnational literacy frameworks that engage the cultural and linguistic repertoires of Black youth in relationship with one another (Skerrett & Omogun, 2020; Smith, 2023) and from Black-centered language pedagogies (Anya, 2017; Clemons, 2021b), I describe how youth negotiate meanings and orientations to Blackness through language and literacy practices.
Descriptors: Multilingualism, Social Justice, Teaching Methods, Learning Processes, Creoles, Blacks, Race, Self Concept, Course Descriptions, Faculty Development, Personal Narratives, Student Attitudes, Second Language Learning, Literacy Education, Language Attitudes, Student Characteristics, Foreign Countries
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www.wiley.com/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Haiti; Dominican Republic
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Social Foundations of Education, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA