Running head: HIP HOP AND LITERACY 1 Hip hop and Literacy in the Lives of Two Students in a Transitional English Course A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) in the College of Education, Criminal Justice and Human Services Literacy and Second Language Studies University of Cincinnati Deborah M. Sánchez, M.Ed. Dr. Susan Watts-Taffe (Chair) Dr. Chester Laine (Co-chair) Dr. Carmen Kynard (Member) Dr. Gulbahar Beckett (Member) HIP HOP AND LITERACY 2 Abstract This qualitative dissertation study investigated the following research question: How does Hip hop influence the literate lives, i.e., the connections of Hip hop to readings, writings and other communicative practices, of students who placed into transitional college English courses? The impetus for the study came from the importance that Hip hop has in the lives of young people (Smitherman, 1997). The participants in this study, Dionne and Mike, were students placed into a 1st year non-credit bearing English course, also known as a transitional course (Armstrong, 2007), at a 4-year university. The study employed tools of ethnography (Heath & Street, 2008), such as interviews, classroom observations and textual analysis of students‘ language and literacy practices in spaces inside and outside of the classroom. This study is conceptually framed within cultural studies (Hicks, 2003, 2005, 2009; Nelson, Treichler, & Grossberg, 1992) and sociocultural studies (Dyson & Smitherman, 2009; Street, 2001). Data were analyzed using linguistic analysis (Alim, 2006) and textual analysis (Kellner, 2009). Findings suggest that Dionne and Mike, two students who disliked reading in the traditional sense, found rhetorical power (Hicks & Dolan, 2003) and humanistic understanding through participation in Hip hop culture. The historical moments, ideological stances, and language of Hip hop contributed to the social construction of these young people‘s literate identities. These two cases provide evidence which might add to a more robust philosophy of ―remedial‖, ―developmental‖, or transitional education, with a renewed focus on affective issues involved in literacy learning. HIP HOP AND LITERACY 3 HIP HOP AND LITERACY 4 Acknowledgments I want to thank my Mother and Father for planting the seeds of social justice and the rest of family and friends for all of their support during the years that I‘ve been working towards finishing the dissertation. A special thanks goes to my husband, Jorge; I never would have achieved this huge accomplishment without his belief in me and constant encouragement. There are many others that I want to thank who contributed their unique academic voices and critical perspectives that helped shape this document, including Drs. Eric J. Paulson, Connie Kendall, Deborah Hicks, Carmen Kynard, and Gulbahar Beckett. I want to give a special thanks to my co-chairs, Drs. Chet Laine and Susan Watts-Taffe, for their kindness, encouragement, and expert knowledge of the field. The defense of this document would not have been possible without all of the hours that both put in to reading and commenting on multiple drafts. I especially appreciate their gentle style which made the process a positive intellectual experience. Thank you to many special colleagues and friends for their kindness and friendship, especially Michelle Holley, Aaron Kerley, Laurie Bien Bauer, Dr. Deborah Kellner, Dr. Susan Bernstein, Hannah Chai, James Stallworth, Dr. Elizabeth Corbo and Dr. Sonya Armstrong. Thank you for all of the laughs, words of encouragement and engaging conversations. Thank you also to the research participants who volunteered to participate in the study, especially Dionne and Mike. HIP HOP AND LITERACY 5 Table of Contents Abstract 2 Chapter 1: Introduction Background 7 Rationale 8 Statement of the Problem 12 Significance of the Study 13 Conceptual Framework 14 Cultural Studies 14 Sociocultural Studies on Language and Literacy 16 Composition Studies 17 Social Networking Sites and Literacy 18 Definitions of Terms 20 Guiding Research Question 22 Chapter 2: Literature Review Overview 23 History of Hip hop Culture 23 African American Language (AAL) 25 Hip hop Linguistics (HHLx) 29 Hip hop Literacies 31 Research on Hip hop and Literacy 32 Hip hop Pedagogy: The Bridge Metaphor 39 History of Open Admissions 40 Research on AAL and College Literacy 42 Hypocritical Language Practices 44 Summary 47 Chapter 3: Methods Overall Research Design 48 Qualitative Data 50 Constant Comparative Perspective 50 Co-occurrences for Pattern Detection 52 Research Context 52 Research Site 52 Research Participants 53 Sampling Procedure 53 Purposeful Sampling 53 Ethnographic Tools 54 Data Content 54 Table 1: Data Content 55 HIP HOP AND LITERACY 6 Table 2: Data Sources 55 Surveys 55 Interviews 57 Semi-structured Interviews 57 Interview 1 57 Interview 2 58 Conceptual Memos 59 Writing on Facebook and Other Artifacts 60 Data Analysis 60 Textual Analysis 60 Linguistic Analysis 66 Hip hop Linguistics (HHLx) 66 Linguistic Analysis of African American Language and Literacy 67 Recursive Process 68 Reflexivity and Ethnocentricity 69 Timeline of Study 70 Chapter 4: ―We Are All Queens‖ Case One Who is Dionne? 72 Findings 75 Black Self-Pride 75 Female Self-Pride 77 AAL in the Everyday/prosaic 81 Activism in Non-Traditional Spaces 85 Hip hop as Activism 85 Christianity as Activism 89 Poetry as Activism 90 Chapter 5: ―A Call to My Soul‖ Hip hop as Cultural Practice 98 Humanistic Understanding 99 Case Two Who is Mike? 103 Findings 103 Hip hop tells a Story 103 Hip hop is Freedom 108 Hip hop is Philosophical 111 The Soul 115 Multiple and Contradictory Texts/subjectivities 122 HIP HOP AND LITERACY 7 Chapter 6: Conclusions and Implications Discussion 129 An Absence of Caring in Education 132 Sociocultural Theories of Language Learning—the Moral Link 133 References 141 Appendices 155 List of Tables and Figures Table 1 Data Content 55 Table 2 Data Sources 55 Figure 1 Screenshot from Mike‘s Facebook page 65 Figure 2 The multiple modes at work within a Facebook page 66 Appendices A. Hip hop Survey 155 B. Interview 1: Protocol 156 C. Interview 2: Protocol 157 D. Adult Consent Form for Research 158 HIP HOP AND LITERACY 8 Chapter 1: Introduction “My son, Christopher Wallace, told stories. Some of them were funny. Some of them were sad. Some of them were violent. But people listened.” Voletta Wallace, Mother of beloved and deceased rapper and Hip hop legend, Christopher “Biggie/Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace Background Why, as Voletta Wallace argued in the quote that introduced this section, did people listen to the stories that her son told? Why are urban youth so moved by the stories expressed in Hip hop music? Smitherman (1997) begins to address the answers to these questions in the following quote about Hip hop in the lives of young people: ―This music has become…the— principal medium for Black youth to ‗express their views of the world‘ and to seek to ‗create a sense of order‘ (Allen, 1996) out of the turbulence and chaos of their, and our, lives‖ (p. 5). This study focuses on the ways in which Hip hop influences the literate lives of two students, one Black and one White, who were placed into a non-credit bearing transitional English course. I am using instead the term transitional to describe the course, and the students in it, in order to move away from any pejorative connotations associated with the words, remedial or developmental. I also wish to describe students who place into these courses as people who are learning academic literacy, which is a complex process that develops over time, not a set of skills that can be mastered in a quarter or semester of ―remediation‖ (Armstrong, 2007; Sánchez & Paulson, 2008). The transition is not a single transition, from worse to better, from inferior to superior, but part of the process of discourse and genre acquisition dependent on situations and life experiences (Ivanič, 1998). This study is both timely and important because the numbers of students enrolling in ―remedial‖ English courses is growing (Boylan, 2000). In addition, although scholars have found that Hip hop plays an important role in the lives of students, and national organizations highlight the importance of connecting literacy to the self and the human HIP HOP AND LITERACY 9 experience (NCTE/IRA Standards for the English Language Arts, 1996), these goals often go by the wayside in discussions about policy, remediation and school reform (Rose, 2009a, 2010). Hip hop was created in the 1970‘s by mostly young African Americans in New York City (Smitherman, 1997) in response to the social conditions that they witnessed around them. More recently, the commercial influence of Hip hop has transcended race and influenced students from many different backgrounds (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2008). Despite its origins as a black cultural art form, Chang (2005) in a historical rendering of the history of Hip hop, argues that cultural homogeneity--the idea that people from many different backgrounds can come together over a similar cultural practice--was one of the original goals of Hip hop. The goal of this research project was not to make the role of Hip hop an essential one in the lives of Black urban youth, or to assume that all Black youth live in urban settings, or that all youth who live in urban areas are Black. While keeping the above points in mind, but at the same time adopting Smitherman‘ s view that Hip hop does play an important role in the lives of many Black youth, I hoped to investigate what students did with Hip hop texts and why Hip hop was so important to them. Since I only included findings from two students in the following study, results are not generalizable.