David Kirkland

“We Real Cool”: Toward a Theory of Black Masculine Literacies

A BSTRA C T This article reports findings from an ethnographic study of the literacy practices of a group of 11- to 14-year-old black males who called themselves “the cool kids.” The study is framed using theories that view literacy as a social and cultural practice involving multiple sign-and-symbol systems. Two research questions guided the study: How did coolness relate to literacy among “the cool kids,” and what symbolic patterns helped to shape these relations? The findings describe how race, gender, and pop culture marked the group’s use of language and style and reveal how coolness, as a pop-cultural artifact of black manhood, contributed to the literacy practices of the young men and to the construction of their symbolic selves. These findings contribute to building a theory of black masculine literacies.

A Comparative Study of Educational Research in China and the United States.

This article examines one major research journal from China and one from the United States. The study compares the two journals with regard to three questions: 1) Who is doing research published in the journals? 2) What are the major issues and concerns represented in the journals? 3) What research methodologies are favoured in the journals? The authors believe that understanding another countrys educational research practices, through addressing these questions, can better enable domestic researchers, educators and policymakers to acknowledge the major educational concerns and issues that exist across countries. As boundaries between national borders continue to blur, this understanding can help educational researchers better interpret and present their findings with greater international relevance.

They Look Scared: Moving from Service Learning to Learning to Serve in Teacher Education--A Social Justice Perspective.

This article investigates three teacher learners’ service learning experiences, in order to explore the extent to which approaches to service learning can lead to legitimate learning outcomes tied to transformative teacher growth and situated in tenets of social justice. Using student interview data, the author posits that service learning fails as a social justice methodology for preparing teachers when it fails to interrupt biases in ways that transform teacher learners into learning servants. The findings suggest that in order to prepare educators to serve, more work needs to happen prior to sending teacher learners into the field, as some of the biases we wish to interrupt may be firmly in place before these new teachers enter the field. The article concludes by reframing service learning through the conceptual methodology of learning to serve.

Motherboards, microphones and metaphors: Re-examining new literacies and black feminist thought through technologies of self

This article examines how two African American females composed counter-selves using a computer motherboard and a stand-alone microphone as critical identity texts. Situated within sociocultural and critical traditions in new literacy studies and black feminist thought, the authors extend conceptions of language, literacy and black femininity via the agentic, powerful and knowledgeable selves of African American women, constructs that are often missing from the scholarship on young African American women and their practices of self-definition. The motherboard and microphone serve as analytical constructs for understanding critical new literacies and subject malleability, which crisscrosses in complex configurations across the experiences, histories and relationships that carry meaning for those who struggle through scenes of silence. Motherboards and microphones act metaphorically as technologies of the self, which resist and reformat cosmologies of black femininity that have long patterned gender oppression. The findings suggest that technologies exist everywhere, and technology related to literacy and language exists in many forms, including vocabularies of motherboards and microphones. The authors conclude that using such vocabularies for expressing identity can work through the power of metaphor in its richest sense to offer new conceptions of self, whereby the subject becomes a personal artifact capable of immense transformative potential.

Engaging Black males on their own terms: What schools can learn from Black males who produce hip-hop

Abstract Education scholars and practitioners have much to learn about engagement and motivation of Black males by directing their inquiries to more organic sites of hip-hop cultural production outside of schools. One such site is the hip-hop’s informal labor economy where Black males engage in earning money through hip-hop cultural production. Labor practices include a myriad of activities such as beat making, promoting shows, teaching dance classes, managing studios and recording sessions, artist development, visual art, and other modes of hip-hop cultural production. Through exploring the decision-making process of Black males that opt to participate in informal labor in lieu of formal labor, we examine what it is that compels their engagement and motivation efforts in hip-hop production. We find that participating in hip-hop cultural production gives Black males: (1) the autonomy to control their own image and maintain their individuality and (2) a sense of worth and belonging to something positive. From these findings, we discuss the need for schools to model themselves after such fields where Black males demonstrate high levels of engagement, motivation, and mastery.