In her new book, Valerie Kinloch, award-winning author of "Harlem on Our Minds", sheds light on the ways urban youth engage in "meaning-making" experiences as a way to assert critical, creative, and highly sophisticated perspectives on teaching, learning, and survival. Kinloch rejects deficit models that have traditionally…

This book describes a new approach to teaching and learning cultural studies. Borrowing the idea of ethnography from anthropologists, it argues that language students can be taught methods for investigating the cultural and social patterns of interaction and the values and beliefs that account for them. Doing an ethnographic study while living…