At a glance
The Seattle Multilingual Youth of Color & Educator Collective promotes linguistic justice for multilingual students and… Read full summary
- Funding received
- 2024-2025
- Small
- Awarded
- $4,740
- Funding partners
-
- Services and Activities Fee (SAF)
- UW Resilience Lab (UWRL)
The Seattle Multilingual Youth of Color & Educator Collective promotes linguistic justice for multilingual students and educators of color in South Seattle schools with three main areas of focus:
1. Bi-Weekly Community Circles: Gather students, parents, educators, and community members to explore linguistic and emotional needs while affirming multilingual practices.
2. Spring Community Gathering: A 2-day event with performances, workshops, and a keynote, centering multilingual voices and equipping educators with community-informed strategies.
3. Digital Resource: Co-create a multilingual resource to support equitable and culturally affirming practices in classrooms, shared with educators and community stakeholders.
The project honors and integrates the voices and identities of multilingual students and their families.
The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world (Pew Research Center, 2016). As of 2021, 11 million students in U.S. public schools were from immigrant-headed households. Within this population Black immigrants – students from African and Caribbean nations – have enrolled in U.S. schools at unparalleled rates in the last five decades. However, Black immigrant students are often excluded from conversations related to society and schooling. This exclusion can be traced to U.S. racialization and racial identity categories that homogenize and overlook Black immigrant students’ diverse ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identities (Agyepong Rong & Brown, 2002). Black immigrant students’ exclusion also extends to U.S. language education policies, research, and programs that have predominantly served pan-ethnic, multilingual youth of color from Asian and Latin American nations. As a result, language policies, research, and pedagogical interventions often miss large populations of Black immigrant multilingual students, especially in urban areas with high percentages of migration.
Seattle, in particular, is home to a growing East African population, with over 27,000 individuals in Seattle/King County (Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs Report, 2016). In Seattle Public Schools, four of the top nine foreign languages spoken in the school district are East African languages – Somali, Amharic, Tigrigna, and Oromo (Seattle Public Schools, 2017). Despite Seattle’s increasing East African population, East African parents, specifically mothers, feel disconnected from their children's schooling experiences (Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs Report, 2016). For instance, parents have expressed feeling unwelcome due to a lack of engagement from school administrators, often only hearing from schools when there is a formal grievance against their child. Language barriers and English-only communication further exacerbate this disconnect, leading to a sense of exclusion and marginalization within the education system.
To respond to these barriers, we build on existing multilingual work implemented with Seattle-based students and educators of color by proposing The Seattle Multilingual Youth of Color & Educator Collective. This collective is co-led by a Black and Liberian graduate student, Sciatta Padmore, and Dr. Lakeya Afolalu, a Nigerian and African-American faculty member in the College of Education’s Language, Literacy, and Culture program who also serves the South Seattle community through community-based literacy work. The overarching mission of this collective is to enhance linguistic justice for Seattle Multilingual students and educators of color in South Seattle schools by leveraging community knowledge and resources. The first phase of this collective focuses on the following three goals for the 2024 – 2025 academic year:
- Bi-Weekly Multilingual, Identity & Well-being Community Circles: In the fall of 2024, we will meet bi-weekly to participate in Multilingual, Identity & Well-being circles. In addition to 1 graduate student, Sciatta Padmore, and Dr. Lakeya Afolalu, this team will include 4 members: 1 multilingual parent who has a student(s) in South Seattle schools; 1 multilingual pre-service teacher of color; 1 multilingual in-service teacher of color; and 1 South Seattle community member. Through these interactive circles, which will doubly serve as planning sessions, we will learn about students and educators’ school-based linguistic, mental, and emotional needs. A critical component of these circles will include acknowledging, affirming, and honoring the rich multilingual practices in the community. The knowledge and experiences shared in these circles will be instrumental in informing the second goal of the collective.
- Spring Multilingual Students & Educators of Color Community Gathering: During the spring of 2025, this 2-day community gathering is geared for multilingual youth of color, immigrant families of color, pre-service/in-service teachers, teacher educators, librarians, school leaders, and community members. The first kickoff evening will bring together community artists, vendors, etc. to commune. It will also include student performances and a keynote address from a South Seattle multilingual student of color. The following full-day event will include a series of workshops from multilingual students of color and their respective families as well as the multilingual educators of color, including those who participated in the Bi-Weekly Multilingual, Identity & Well- being Community Circles. These workshops are designed to (1) center their voices and perspectives and (2) equip pre-service, in-service teachers, teacher educators, and school leaders with multilingual training, knowledge, and resources that are critical and community informed. This 2-day gathering will culminate with a questionnaire that will help to develop the digital resource in the third goal of this collective.
- Digital Multilingual Youth of Color Resource: At the end of spring 2025, following the Spring Multilingual Students & Educators of Color Community-Based Gathering, we will reconvene with the students, families, and educators from the Bi-Weekly Multilingual, Identity & Well-being Community Circles to co-create a digital multilingual resource. This digital resource, which will center the voices and perspectives of multilingual students of color and their respective families, offering community-informed knowledge, resources, and pedagogical strategies that enhance linguistic justice for multilingual students in South Seattle classrooms. It will be shared with pre-service/in-
service educators, teacher educators, school leaders, libraries, non-profit organizations, etc. to engage in critical and equitable multilingual approaches to support and researchers to honor, affirm, integrate, and support East African students’ languages in the classroom
Sciatta Padmore
Project lead
- sciatta@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Student
- Years
- 2 year(s) remaining at UW
- Affiliated groups
- College of Education
Dr. Lakeya Afolalu
Team member
- lafolalu@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Faculty
- Affiliated groups
- College of Education
Mia Tuan
Dean of College
- mtuan@uw.edu
- Affiliation and department
- College of Education
- Stakeholder approval form
Request amount and budget
n/a
Measure the impacts
This 3-part programming is the first phase of a larger project of The Seattle Multilingual Youth of Color & Educator Collective. We envision that, as we learn more, establish deep community relationships, and gain access to more funding, the collective will expand to enhance linguistic justice for multilingual youth of color beyond the South Seattle community.