Promoting Academic Literacy with Urban Youth through Engaging Hip-Hop Culture

Review of For White folks who teach in the Hood … and the rest of y’all too: Reality pedagogy and urban education

“…Although the idea of celebrating urban students' various identities to promote academic success is not a new concept in the field of education, as noted by the work of previous scholars (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2002;Ladson-Billings, 1995;Lewis, 2011) the personal narrative throughout the text that infuses a bit of theory, pedagogy and relentless love for black/brown youth makes this an important and insightful academic work of art. Several pedagogical strategies are outlined, including: co-teaching opportunities between teachers and students, cogenerative dialogues with a group of students (referred to as cogens), and an emphasis on respecting the students' cultural cosmopolitanism and fashion choices in the classroom and throughout the curriculum.…”

Schooling Teachers, Schooling Ourselves: Insights and Reflections from Teaching K-12 Teachers How to Use Hip-hop to Educate Students

“…HHBE researchers have primarily used critical (Emdin, 2008;Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002;Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2005;Stovall, 2006) and culturally relevant (Abowitz, 1997;Alexander-Smith, 2004;Hill, 2009) frameworks for orienting their respective pedagogies and outcomes. LadsonBillings (1992) posits, "While critical pedagogy seeks to help the individual critique and change the social environment, culturally relevant pedagogy urges collective action grounded in cultural understandings, experiences, and ways of knowing the world" (pp.…”

“…We use hip-hop pedagogy (Emdin, 2008;Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2005;Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002;Rice, 2003;Stovall, 2006) and critical multicultural teacher education for White teacher candidates (Banks, 1995;Lensmire & Snaza, 2010;Lowenstein, 2009;Milner, 2005) as theoretical guides for this study. HHBE researchers have primarily used critical (Emdin, 2008;Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002;Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2005;Stovall, 2006) and culturally relevant (Abowitz, 1997;Alexander-Smith, 2004;Hill, 2009) frameworks for orienting their respective pedagogies and outcomes.…”

“…More recently, a burgeoning body of research known as "hip-hop-based education" (HHBE) (Hill, 2009;Petchauer, 2009) has demonstrated the ways that hip-hop culture can be used to produce favorable educational environments and student outcomes. Specifically, HHBE research reflects how hip-hop cultural texts (most often in the form of printed rap lyrics) can improve student motivation, increase achievement, nurture critical literacies, and strengthen classroom community (Camangian, 2008;Emdin, 2010;Hill, 2009;Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002). …”

Measuring Situated Literacy Activity

“…Although different attempts have been made to wed literacy instruction to socially situated literacy activity (see Lee, 1997;Morrell, 2008;Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002), the most commonly implemented literacy curricula in schools continue to embody Street's antithetical construct of literacy as "autonomous" skills, separable from contexts of use and measurable as independent end points. Within this observation, it is crucial to point out that this autonomous, context-free construct of literacy has gained sufficient political traction that research into the teaching of reading and writing is funded, and the results accepted, primarily by the degree to which the research relies on such end-point measures of literacy ability.…”