Hip Hop and Literacy in the Lives of Two Students in a Transitional English Course
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).
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