“Here Comes a Thought”: Steven Universe as Social Emotional Curriculum

The emphasis on social emotional learning as a focus in schools has led to the development of new materials for curriculum in classrooms for teaching social emotional content and competencies. This paper conceptualizes the use of narrative television and animation, specifically, the cartoons Steven Universe and Steven Universe Future as powerful pedagogical tools for engaging social emotional learning in classrooms. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the efficacy of these cartoons as tools for classroom use given their emphasis on inclusivity, diversity, and their popularity with young people today. Utilizing the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning Competencies as a framework, the paper highlights selected episodes of the shows, and demonstrates ways the shows can be used to teach these competencies. As teachers continue to encounter ever-diversifying student populations, the use of media such as Steven Universe can help support inclusive classroom environments that engage the emotional lives and experiences of young people today.

Creating Gaps in Understanding: How Gen Z Disrupts Gender Norms on TikTok

Since its inception, social media has been an important method of constructing and performing identity, including gender identity. Identity work on social media is perhaps especially relevant to Gen Z (those born after 1996; Parker & Igielnik, 2020), who are the first generation with access to it in early childhood. In this article, we explore how Gen Z constructs and performs gender identity and other facets of intersectional identity on popular video platform TikTok by analyzing selected content from three TikTokers through the lenses of performativity, intersectionality, and automediality.

Media Consumption and News Literacy Habits During the covid-19 Pandemic

The covid-19 pandemic disrupted political, economic, and social life in the United States beginning in March 2020, disproportionately affecting historically underrepresented groups. Media assumed unique roles during the pandemic, serving simultaneously as the gateway to work, education, social life, news, and public health information. Yet the covid-19 pandemic has been so challenged by misinformation that the World Health Organization declared it an infodemic. Because misinformation can prolong pandemics and increase deaths, news and media literacy can benefit society at large, especially vulnerable populations. The purpose of this descriptive study is to capture how undergraduates used media, how they obtained their news, and how they engaged news literacy skills during the covid-19 pandemic. A survey of over 900 undergraduate students showed that over two-thirds of respondents increased media use. Over half of respondents reported entertainment as their top reason for media use during the pandemic and reported news as their last reason. Respondents reporting previous exposure to news literacy education were significantly more likely to use most of the measured news literacy strategies. The findings of this study can support developing pandemic-responsive news and media literacy education which will be useful during future pandemics.

Knowledge of Self: Possibilities for Spoken Word Poetry, Hip Hop Pedagogy, and “Blackout Poetic Transcription” in Critical Qualitative Research

This article traces the development of Blackout Poetic Transcription (BPT) as a critical methodology for artist-scholars engaged with Hip Hop pedagogy in higher education spaces. We include Keith’s outline of the BPT method and Endsly’s first hand account of implementing the practice in an undergraduate classroom. Together, the authors grapple with mainstream and alternative identities within their Hip Hop praxis as spoken word artists and educators.

Ambitionz az a Teacha: understanding Contemporary Rap Music’s Pedagogical Implications

This case study extends Elligan’s (2000, 2004) Rap Therapy model to explore the pedagogical usefulness of contemporary rap music. Methodologically, the authors borrow the testimonio from Latina Feminist Scholarship, to explore the ways in which young people participating in a summer literacy program analyzed their lives and the world through rap music; how rap music supported their healing; and how rap music was used as a pedagogical tool. Over the course of four months the co-authors of this study created and analyzed 17 co-written testimonios for their generative themes. The authors conclude with a presentation of The (Re) mix—a rap-centered pedagogical framework. The (Re) mix is made up of three, interconnected pillars. One, contemporary rap music (re)tells the experience(s) of the dispossessed. It helps shift the blame for oppression in the world towards the structures of society. Second, contemporary rap music (re)affirms young peoples’ existence. It provides them with an imaginative environment to imagine a more just world. Third, contemporary rap music (re)stores our humanity. It is a tool to name, connect, and move beyond our pain, creating a context for healing as individuals in a collective society. The authors hope that findings of this study empower other educators to infuse contemporary rap music into their pedagogies as a method for students to better read and write the world, adding to the body of knowledge related to critical media literacy.

“It’s TikTok with no c!”: the Need for Critical Literacy Curricula in the Elementary Classroom

Students walk into the classroom with numerous hours of exposure to social media. Through different social media platforms, they engage in digital literacy and experience entertainment but also, questions, frustrations and different negotiations of their identities. This qualitative, ethnographic case study was done in an elementary classroom in the Midwest. Participants revealed their keen awareness to the viral debates that happened on TikTok (a mobile video- sharing app) regarding race and the frustrations they experienced through it personally. These findings suggest the urgent need for critical literacy curricula (specifically critical Hip Hop pedagogy) to be implemented within schools for dialogue to even begin which could eventually become an avenue for students to express their agency.

Re-Mixing Making: examining the Intersections of Hip Hop Culture, Maker Spaces, and Social Justice Education

Despite the potential to promote critical literacy formation, academic engagement and social justice education, maker activities and maker spaces do not always support or engage historically marginalized communities. This paper chronicles a response to this problem by examining a study created to support equitable engagement with youth in an after-school workshop series over 8-weeks that focused on Hip Hop cultural practices and the simultaneous development of critical literacy and social justice perspectives. The series, open to community youth was located in the makerspace of the local public library. Within this study, project designers drew from Gutierrez and Rogoff’s concept of “repertoires of practice” and focused particularly on questions of what counts as making, and who has agency to make these decisions and how engagement with hip hop culture mediates these understandings. I consider two instances where students engaged in Hip Hop- centered generative practices (particularly beat making and graffiti writing) and analyze moments of student resistance and agency as opportunities to expand understandings of development of critical media literacy and social justice orientation. This paper foregrounds the importance of iterative analysis and design as participants develop artistic, social, and political identities over the course of the workshop. Finally, this paper explores implications for classroom learning that emerged from the work, including expression, exploration, and collaboration.

“I am not Jasmine; I am Aladdin”: How Youth Challenge Structural Inequity through Critical Hip Hop Literacies

Previous research on Hip Hop Education has advocated for the inclusion of critical media literacy in schools and for the recognition of Hip Hop music and culture as a central component of young people’s literate and social identities (e.g. Hall, 2017; Kelly, 2020; McArthur, 2016). This article places critical Hip Hop literacy at the intersections of media education, social justice education, and culturally sustaining pedagogies by discussing the role of Hip Hop literature and culture as a form of text that can foster young people’s critical consciousness development in the secondary classroom. Through analysis of data collected in a high school Hip Hop Literature and Culture class, this qualitative case study examines how critical Hip Hop literacy practices can support youth sociopolitical development in racially diverse classrooms and schools. The results of this study reveal the need for schools to support students in identifying, analyzing, and challenging structures of oppression through the development of critical Hip Hop literacies.