The Hip Hop Literacy Project: Documenting the traditions, motivation and methods of Hip-Hop written compositions

Shuaib Meacham

Scholars have widely varying conceptions regarding the impact of hip-hop on education in general and literacy in particular. African American cultural critics and scholars such as Crouch (1999) and McWhorter (2001) have decried hip-hop's negative impact on the educational identity and academic motivations of African American young people. With respect to literacy, Harvard sociology professor Richard Ferguson has blamed "hip-hop music" (Hayward, 2000, p.1) for the decline in African American literacy test scores since the late 1980s. On the other hand, in his literary anthology of young African American writers, author Kevin Powell proclaimed the existence of a new "word (writing) movement" (Powell, 2000, p. 4) among young African Americans directly attributable to the influence of hip-hop. Powell declared that "There would be no major movement among young scribes had there been no hip-hop...Hip-hop catalyzed a young black verbal expression as had not been done since the 1960's" (Powell, 2000, p. 4). Such incompatible divergence in perspectives demonstrates how very little is known academically about the written literacies of hip-hop. Due, in part, to the ethos of entertainment wherein it is situated, hip-hop poets and lyricists are almost never portrayed as writers even within hip-hop's own media publications. Writing in hip-hop is most frequently associated with "hip-hop journalists" (Powell, 2000), who write about hip-hop culture, but not those who compose the lyrics that inspire the culture. The Hip-Hop Literacy Project aims to address these discrepancies by conducting systematic inquiry guided by the following questions: (a) What are the verbal composition processes within "hip hop" and the practices and functions of reading and writing that inform those processes? (b) What are the various disciplines and practices by which hip-hop writers improve their compositional abilities? (c) What are the prior texts that hip-hop writers draw from, and do they reflect politically motivated thematic patterns? The research design of this project closely resembles that of Berliner (1994) in his systematic study of the compositional practices and pedagogies underlying jazz improvisation called "Thinking in Jazz." Until recently jazz, like hip-hop was a misunderstood art form with rigorous compositional disciplines concealed beneath both social and academic misinformation. Methods for this study will attempt to uncover the disciplines and competencies that inform the implicit pedagogy of hip-hop. Berliner's methods (1994) will be supplemented by "think-aloud" protocols used in Smagorinsky (1997) to provide greater detail regarding the cognition occurring within writing activities. I will also transcribe lyrics/poems and collect articles from hip-hop, spoken word and literary publications that describe relevant themes, practices, and objectives underlying hip-hop composition.

About Shuaib Meacham

Shuaib Meacham is an Assistant Professor of Literacy Instruction in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. His research aims to apply knowledge insights from African American culture in general and literacy traditions in particular to address educational challenges broadly conceived. He is also a "spoken word" poet who has worked with community poets to introduce teachers to the writing processes implicit within spoken word poetry. Shuaib has performed his poetry and schools and has developed a commitment to develop the unique power in the voices of young writers and to help them transfer that power to all of the genres in which they write. Most recently, he has embraced multimedia (music and video) technology in order to help teachers and students use technology to increase literacy engagement. Shuaib Meacham also works with teachers to familiarize them with the educational resources within inner city communities. He presently lives in Wilmington Delaware with his wife Karen, and his daughters Aisha (14) and Karis (3).