Ernest Morrell

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

he Digest of Education Statistics forecasts that, during the next decade, the number of ethnic minority teachers will shrink to 5 percent, while the enrollment of ethnic minority children in America’s schools will grow to 41 percent. As classrooms across the country become increasingly diverse, determining how to connect in significant ways across multiple lines of difference may be the greatest challenge facing teachers today. Teachers in new century schools must meet this challenge and find ways to forge meaningful relationships with students who come from different worlds, while also helping these students

Studying the Struggle: Contexts for Learning and Identity Development for Urban Youth

Activism and organizing can be a fertile subject matter for young people to study. This article presents a case study of a summer seminar in which urban high school students examined the historical struggle for educational justice in their communities. Adopting a “communities of practice” approach to learning, the article documents the changing participation of seminar participants and the changing identities and skills that this entailed. During the seminar, students took on identities as “critical researchers”— skilled investigators who produce and share knowledge relevant to social change. In the process, seminar participants developed and deployed high-level academic skills in language arts, social studies, and mathematics.

Teachers as Civic Agents Toward a Critical Democratic Theory of Urban Teacher Development

Under the guise of increasing quality and accountability, many urban teacher education programs and professional development models characterize educators as mere transmitters of standardized content knowledge. The authors argue that such dehumanizing practices, which are rooted in the discourse of neoliberalism, prevent teachers from helping their students develop powerful literacies and civic skills. The authors seek to disrupt mainstream views about teaching and learning by instead envisioning the “Teacher as Civic Agent.” By reevaluating theories of schooling and democracy and analyzing a particular learning community that conceptualizes teachers as public intellectuals, this work aims to make an important theoretical shift in how educators, politicians, and policy makers think about the purpose of education in a democracy. The authors argue for new paradigm of teacher education in which teachers engage with local communities, become producers of knowledge, and work collectively in solidarity with their students to create social change.

Critical Sociology in K-16 Early Intervention: Remaking Latino Pathways to Higher Education

This article examines the pathways to higher education of two working-class Latino students participating in an intervention program at a diverse, metropolitan high school. Using critical narratives from 2 of the 30 student participants, this article exposes several reasons disproportionately low numbers of Latino students gain access to higher education. Furthermore, their narratives identify several strategies to empower and guide first-generation Latino students toward college access.

The Council of Youth Research: Critical Literacy and Civic Agency in the Digital Age.

This article explores the relationship between critical literacy practice, digital media production, and civic agency in the Council of Youth Research, a youth participatory action research program in which Los Angeles high school students conduct research and create dynamic, multimedia presentations as leaders of a growing youth movement for educational justice. We examine theories of critical literacy to articulate a vision of literacy that is tied to societal power structures for the purpose of personal and social transformation. In order to bring critical literacy theory into practice, we explore the ways in which critical pedagogy and participatory digital literacies structure the work of the Council. We use ethnography of communication and visual sociology to analyze literacy events from 1 year of the Councils work to highlight ways in which student digital literacy production manifested powerful civic agency. We conclude by discussing the implications of this work for classrooms and further grounded research in pedagogies of participatory media.

21st-Century Literacies, Critical Media Pedagogies, and Language Arts.

In the second decade of the 21st century, information has been globalized, digitized, and sped up to move at the speed of thought. Being literate in this new world means programming personal websites, sending e-mails from mobile devices and spending hours communicating via virtual social networks. Our students are products of this world. However, for all their digital expertise, there is still a great deal that these youth have to learn about how to process the information they are inundated with via these new portals of information. Teachers today have a responsibility to help students acquire these 21st century literacies without abandoning a commitment to the traditional literacies that have defined education to date. This article argues that language arts educators must inject the discipline with these new tools and ways of communication as concepts such as reading, writing, listening, and speaking take on new dimensions in the media age.

City youth and the pedagogy of participatory media

Recently, two different images of learning in schools today flooded through our various social networks. Logging on to Facebook, one high-school teacher bemoaned the fact that her students in a Los Angeles classroom were using their mobile devices to take pictures of the notes on the board: the teacher put in hard work preparing and sharing content and students, with a few button presses, captured hours of work effortlessly. Commenters shared that they banned mobile devices for similar reasons and the word ‘lazy’ was invoked by more than one participant in the socially networked discussion. Also shared on Facebook and other social networks like the educational community that relies on the Twitter hashtag #educhat, an article from the online site Mashable proclaimed, ‘Low Income Students’ Test Scores Leap 30% with Smartphone Use’ (Freeman 2012). Citing academic uses of mobile technology, the article concluded with a quote from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski that ‘digital literacy’ is necessary for students and parents so they can use ‘the tools and know-how to use technology for education and job skills training’. In both of these stories, the fact that these contexts for learning and technology use took place in historically marginalized spaces was prominent. As educators and educational researchers continue to grapple with how uses of new communications technologies can increase educational equity, the challenges of adjusting pedagogy to meet these needs are often being disregarded. Throughout this issue, we seek to explore how the educational challenges that city youth face around the globe can be confronted with what we call a pedagogy of participatory media.

Critical Approaches to Media in Urban English Language Arts Teacher Development

Why is it essential that English teachers acknowledge youth literacy practices in out-of-school contexts? How will an engagement of youth as media producers lead to academic literacy development? And why should the popular cultural practices of young people be incorporated into secondary English classrooms? This article asks these questions and more as it considers the applications of a critical pedagogy of urban English education that acknowledges and honors nonschool literacy practices and promotes literacy as a tool for academic development, cultural production, and social change. The article begins by articulating a critical new literacy studies approach to English education that fosters increased engagement and achievement for historically underserved youth. It then discusses several projects from English methods courses including a microethnography of literacy project and a multimedia theme-based unit, as examples of ways to link theory to practice in English education. The article next offers several activity systems that have proven powerful spaces for teacher learning to push us toward a more critical model of urban literacy teacher development. These include a community asset mapping activity, a neighborhood exploration project, and two programs that engage practicing teachers as critical social scientists. The article concludes with a charge to English educators to develop methods courses that embrace critical approaches to new media literacies while also honoring our commitments to help preservice teachers enact classroom curricula and pedagogies that simultaneously empower students culturally and adhere to state and national literacy standards.

Multiple perspectives on preparing teachers to teach reading

Book reviewed in this article: Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading: Preparing Teachers for a Changing World. Catherine Snow, Peg Griffin, & M. Susan Burns. (Eds.). 2005.

Critical Literacy, Educational Investment, and the Blueprint for Reform: An Analysis of the Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

This article analyzes, “A Blueprint for Reform: The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” a recently released report from the U.S. Department of Education. It begins with an analysis of the strengths of the report. The Blueprint argues for increased college access and more federal attention to public education. In addition, the Blueprint outlines an inclusive and simultaneous commitment to educational equity and national excellence. The article then transitions to a critique of the Blueprints choosing to blame teachers and school leaders for the failure of schools instead of acknowledging the past failure of the federal government to adequately invest in public education. The final section challenges the literacy community to amass all that we know about effective critical literacy instruction and share that information with the general public. The article concludes by calling for a national literacy research collective that examines successful classrooms and other nonschool spaces where children are learning, where they are happy, where they feel good about themselves, and where they have maintained strong connections to families and communities while learning skills that make them ready for college and for the world of civic engagement.