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Drawing on her award-winning research, Dr. Loukia K. Sarroub explains how teachers can help displaced, immigrant, and refugee youth navigate literacy, religion, and success in public schools.
This column features Dr. Loukia K. Sarroub and her award-winning research on how Arab Muslim refugee and immigrant youth navigate religion, gender, and literacy in school. Dr. Sarroub is a professor of literacy studies, education, and linguistics, and she serves as the graduate programs chair in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education at the University of NebraskaLincoln. She was the recipient of the LRA Edward B. Fry Book Award for All American Yemeni Girls: Being Muslim in a Public School (2005), which examines Yemeni American girls' attempts to negotiate their identities across home and school contexts-spaces with vastly different cultural values, expectations, and traditions. As part of her professional service, Dr. Sarroub serves on the editorial board of Research in the Teaching of English. She has also served on the committee for the Alan C. Purves Award, which is "presented annually to the author(s) of the Research in the Teaching of English article from the previous year's volume judged as likely to have the greatest impact on educational practice (https://ncte.org /awards/journal-article-awards/alan-cpurves-award/).
This conversation was recorded on March 3, 2020, and has been edited for publication.
Jennifer Danridge Turner (JDT): Dr. Sarroub, thank you for talking with me today. I know that your work with Arab Muslim refugee and immigrant youth focuses on the intersections of literacy, religion, and gender across home and school contexts. However, are there similarities between your conceptualization of identity intersections in your research and the theory of intersectionality?
Loukia K. Sarroub (LKS): This is a great question. Ive actually never used the word intersectionality in my work, but I appreciate that it has been included more recently in the field of education, and has been taken up by a growing number of literacy scholars (ComptonLilly et al., 2017; Muhammad & Haddix, 2016; Turner & Griffin, 2020). The inception of intersectionality occurred with Kimberlé Crenshaws work (1989). Crenshaw is a legal scholar, and she was interested in why women, and Black women in particular, were marginalized both by workplace practices and by feminist theories. In the 1980s, Crenshaw's work showed that even...