Literacy for African Americans has never been merely about skill development and text comprehension. Its primary purposes and foci have been liberation, empowerment, and self-determination. From slave narratives to contemporary liberation movements assisted by social media, African Americans have deployed literacy strategically to as Paulo Freire…

This article offers considerations for music teachers interested in including hip-hop music in their classrooms but who might feel concerned with or overwhelmed by issues of appropriateness. Two concerns related to hip-hop music are examined: language and negative social themes. Commercial interests in hip-hop music have created a simulacrum (or…

The B-baby Program is a hip-hop dance curriculum designed to prepare dance instructors to teach and lead toddlers in the safe and effective practice of "break dancing" (breakin'). In 2011, my twin sister and I founded a hip-hop organization called Child of This Culture. We have over 32 years of combined experience as competitive break…

Community music is a successful concept in the world of music and music education. Based on ethnomusicological research, community music tries to implement the notion of music for all that transforms societies and people. While celebrating informal learning and the musical amateur, community music has never really been philosophically challenged…

This paper presents a broad-reaching effort to interrogate enduring colonial legacies as experienced by Native American youth in the United States of America and Black Portuguese youth of Cape Verdean origin in Portugal. As part of its methodological approach, it uses hip-hop--a cultural movement composed of four elements including rap music--to…

Video gaming has become a multi-billion dollar industry that continues to capture the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of millions of gamers who span all ages. Narrative and interactive games form part of this market. The popularity of tablet computers and the technological advances of video games have led to a renaissance in the genre for both youth…

This paper presents findings from a study of students' writings about the erotic. These occurred in the form of graffiti and were scrawled on toilet doors for female students attending a higher education institution in Malta. The study explores how the erotic was defined and perceived by students, and how they attempted to create alternative…

This paper brings together general principles for teaching inquiry across disciplines with those generally employed in mathematics classrooms. It describes some broad principles of teaching inquiry to first-year writing students and shows how these can be employed in the context of a course on game theory in popular culture. Although undergraduate…

Popular culture images of reading tend to portray readers as solitary individuals deeply immersed in reading a single text in a quiet, undisturbed spot. Yet, in our documentation of adolescent students reading in Singapore secondary schools, we find that there are many ways and modes of reading, much of which is social in nature. Through the use…

In contemporary culture, it is natural to think that purchasing and owning the "right" possessions results in happiness. This belief supports our loyalty to consumer society. However, several lines of research demonstrate that high consumption lifestyles and materialistic values are not a trustworthy path to well-being. Instead,…

The Disney/Pixar film, "Monsters University" (2013) was a tremendous financial success. As a film written entirely about college students and their quest for social and economic attainment, but marketed primarily to children and adolescents, its messages about the purpose of college and the college experience deserve close examination…

This article explicates the ways that the popular television series "Sons of Anarchy" in conjunction with our content analysis coding tool can be used to teach theories and concepts central to Sociology of Deviance courses. We detail how students learned to understand deviance as a social constructed phenomenon by coding and analyzing…

Digital music streaming are climbing but overall music revenue is declining with digital music piracy being blamed as the culprit. In a 10 year period from 2003 to 2013, global music sales dropped from $US23.3 to $US15 billion dollars with Thailand's music industry following the trend dropping from $US 304 million in 2010 to $US 279 million in…

This study is about contemporary Korean parents' social tensions and the cultural meanings around digital play. Through interviews with 13 middle-class Korean parents, they discussed their perspectives on digital play, including their views of popular culture, high-technology, and learning, which created inner conflicts and negotiations with their…

American popular culture romanticises relationships between sex workers and their customers; novels, films and television depict prostitutes as innocents in need of rescue by a wealthy or powerful man. Miss Laura's Social Club, a restored Victorian brothel in Fort Smith, Arkansas, USA, functions both as an informal house museum and the visitor…