Given polarizing popular-media narratives of immigrant youth from West African countries, we construct an interdisciplinary framework engaging a Sankofan approach to analyze education research literature on social processes of navigating identities and engaging civically across immigrant youth’s heritage practices and Indigenous knowledges. In examining social processes, we disrupt three areas of inequalities affecting educational experiences of immigrant youth: (a) homogenizing notions of a monolithic West Africa and immigrant youth’s West African countries, (b) deficit understandings of identities and the heterogeneity of Black immigrant youth from West African countries living in the United States, and (c) singular views of youth’s civic engagement. We provide implications for researchers, policymakers, and educators to better meet youth’s teaching and learning needs.

This article examines how 18 teachers, counselors, administrators, and support staff from seven New York City public high schools collaborated during the Black and Latino Male Professional Development Initiative (a pseudonym) to develop a "culturally relevant, schoolwide, college-going culture" supportive of Black and Latino males' college readiness and access. We draw from a mixed-methods empirical research study to discuss participants' changing understandings of the features of such a culture, and how participants' action plans illuminate steps for change in their schools. We provide recommendations for creating equitable educational opportunities for Black and Latino males supportive of access to postsecondary education.

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At a time when youth are increasingly negotiating new media literacy practices across multiple contexts, literacy researchers are compelled to take notice and reconsider methodologies that centre the researcher, to purposefully engage youth's knowledge, identities and new media literacies as research methodologies. To that end, the authors constructed and enacted a Social-Participatory Youth Co-Researcher methodology across two in-depth interpretive qualitative research studies. Specifically, the authors describe and analyse how such a methodology enacts purposeful researcher roles for youth that forefront their emerging literacies and complicate static notions of teacher, research(er), standardised curriculum and teacher evaluation whilst youth grapple with issues of educational equity.