The public educational system is comprised of diverse demographics wherein each student has a distinct cultural personal history (O'Brien, 1998). In America, the traditional perception was that a melting pot society existed. But deMarrais and LeCompte (1999) maintain that a stew pot or salad bowl would be a more appropriate analogy. Melting pot…

Language use and creative writing go hand in hand. In the process of exploring language, we also engage in the study of literature. An engagement with literature is, indeed, a continuing process of improving our capacity to use language and refining our sensibility to good language use. In Kenya, there are clearly discernible patterns of creative…

Many young people in Newark, New Jersey, when they cross the invisible line that separates street from school, enter what constitutes for them an alien territory, a place where their values, experiences and their ways of talking and thinking are not acknowledged, respected, or welcomed. At the same time, schools are also one of the few places…

Literacy "sponsorship" in refugee communities is not without its risks and limitations. For potential sponsors, risks include the commodification of refugee voices, while limits include inaccurate generalizations of those being sponsored. This essay draws from a case study of refugee student discourse to discuss how a more explicit…

While scholars argue that "multicultural education" initiatives are rooted in liberal Western ideals, such projects are increasingly being exported to non-Western countries with significantly different sociohistorical contexts. This article examines the adaptation of multicultural education on the Nigerian version of "Sesame…

This article questions the dominant understanding that immigrant and refugee parents in parent-teacher conferences are silent because they come from a culture where one does not question the authority of the teacher. Instead, it is argued that they "become" silent through certain interactional processes. Building on material from an…

Hip-hop is a truly African-American art form in every sense of the phrase. Multiple decades after its development into the genre that we recognize it as today, hip-hop firmly remains a fundamental and unique element of African-American culture that has experienced international presence and regard. As a direct result of deep involvement with…

This discourse analysis and content analysis examined media bias in the representation of critical incidents that have occurred at historically black colleges and universities in dominant contemporary print news media. The research was framed using the two theories of agenda setting theory and framing theory. The literature at the foundation of…

In 1994, cultural critic Mark Dery coined the term "Afrofuturism" to refer to "speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture--and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a…

We explored how arts-based practices, specifically what we define as ethnodance informs the study of science identity. We present a theoretical argument supported by an empirical illustration of how ethnodance offers Black youth with dance identities a medium to narrate evolving science identities, communicating meanings, interactions, and…

Purpose: This paper aims to argue that culturally responsive approaches to literacy instruction are necessary not only to celebrate Black girl literacies but to also expose, challenge and disrupt antiblackness in English education. However, without explicit exemplars to guide classroom practice, this type of instruction will remain elusive. The…

On the 400th anniversary of American enslavement the New York Times (NYT) 1619 project launched an interactive digital experience including a popular podcast centering the contributions and narratives of Black Americans. This study sought to understand how HBCU students responded to learning Black music history through what we term a "pop…

This article addresses and explores hip-hop's reclamation of space using transit as a public bulletin. It is situated within counter-publics discourse and couched in the theoretical frameworks offered by visual rhetorical theory. This article also discusses hip-hop counter-publics through guerrilla advertising by former graffiti artists, SKI and…

The purpose of this study is to investigate into the acute and perennial under-representation of women in Nigerian Politics. In Nigeria women make up half of the population and they have been known to have contributed in no small measure to the development and sustenance of the society yet they are hardly there in the political scene. We have…

This study examines the relationship between informal science and indigenous innovations in local communities in which students matured. The discussion considers methods for bridging the gap that exists between parents' understanding of informal science ("Ubunifu") and what students learn in secondary schools in Kenya, Tanzania, and…