Culturally relevant pedagogy is a framework that conceptualizes the process of student learning as contingent upon educators' deep understanding of students' cultural backgrounds to co-construct knowledge and develop academic skills. Concurrently, there are a growing number of studies that explore hip-hop as a culturally relevant curriculum for…

In this article the authors provide a general overview of the controversies associated with urban street fiction, a brief introduction to the genre and an introduction to the complex representations of Black adolescent femininity within two contemporary titles, "Black and Ugly" (Styles, 2006) and "Bitch" (King, 2006). The authors provide a…

This article describes how faculty provided opportunities for urban high school students to develop literacy proficiencies in reading, writing, and technology. The 12 students participating in an on-campus summer program completed four projects using technology. The faculty collected and reviewed a variety of sources to gain insights into the…

Using Critical Race and Latino Critical theories, this study examines 20 in-depth interviews conducted by the author with Mexican and Puerto Rican youth from the Chicago area. The author contends that youth utilized hip hop music in multiple and overlapping ways, engaging hip hop music as both a pedagogy that centers the perspectives of people of…

Examined how two urban teens used key popular texts to construct a sense of place by mobilizing the texts in very specific ways (finding specific thematic links between and across them and using them to index their relationships with family in this city and "down South"). Highlights the complex, emergent, and "messy"…

While the major urban centers around the country were flooded by millions of protesters demanding immigrant rights in March 2006, the San Francisco Bay Area remained relatively quiet. A coalition of organizers, including Centro Legal de la Raza, Deporten A La Migra, and the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition mobilized a one-week hunger strike,…

This final report attempts to capture the work and atmosphere of the recent symposium convened by Motivational Educational Entertainment, Inc. (MEE), a black-owned communications research, consulting, and video production company. In its commitment to helping urban youth, MEE conducted a study of the "hip-hop" generation and its…

What Motivational Educational Entertainment (MEE) has learned about popular urban youth culture and the "hip-hop generation" is updated and expanded, focusing on substance use and abuse, violence, and sexuality. Qualitative focus groups were used to obtain the opinions of former high school dropouts who were enrolled in General…

Effective communications strategies for delivering substance abuse and other prosocial behavior messages to African American inner city teenagers were studied. After pilot studies, the final sample consisted of middle school and high school students from the urban centers of New York City; Washington, D.C.; Camden (New Jersey); Philadelphia…