🎤💡 How to Get Your Students to Read Scholarly Journals Using Hip-Hop 🎶📚
Let’s keep it 100 💯: Most students hate reading, especially scholarly journals. But can you blame them? We’re living in an era where storytelling is on life support. 👵🏽👴🏽 Big Momma and Papa can’t even tell their stories because the kids have AirPods jammed in their ears 🎧. Social media? It’s all surface, lacking soul. Even movies, they’re recycled over and over. And the music? It’s abstract, cold, and sometimes cruel. So why should students give two 💩s about some dry scholarly journal?
But don’t get it twisted, scholarly journals hold major gems. 💎 They’re like intellectual cyphers where the dopest scholars spit 🔥 and get their peers' approval. Problem is, our students can’t see the sauce. They’re shook—traumatized by the unfamiliar, intimidated by pages and pages of academic language.
So what do we, as the educators of today—the rebels—do? We take that mountain and break it down to a molehill. 🏔➡️🏔
🔥💥 Here's the move: Hip-Hop Pedagogy meets scholarly reading.💥🔥
#💡ProTip: When students see those big, dense journals, they freeze. ❄️ But we’ve got the blueprint! Have them start with the abstract, the discussion, the conclusion, and then finally the introduction. Chop it up into smaller, digestible parts! 🤏🏾✂️ In my class, I break students into groups to read each section. 🎤 And because this is Hip-Hop, I play their songs 🎶. Five minutes in, music stops, they rotate, read, and digest the next section. We’re moving like a cypher: they share their knowledge with the whole class.
#Gamechanger 💯: Cypher reading sessions. 💭 Create a space where Hip-Hop promotes literacy. Each cypher is a unit, and like hip-hop, reading becomes social. They vibe, they read, they learn together.
💥💡 Here's the Cypher Breakdown 💡💥
1️⃣ The Reader 📖 – This student spits the text to the group, drops heavy quotes, and calls out words the squad doesn’t know. 2️⃣ The Wordsmith 📝 – The vocab plug. This student looks up unknown words and drops them in the cypher’s vocabulary list. They level up the word game. 3️⃣ The Analyzer 🔍 – The one who breaks it down. They look at the quotes, decipher what they mean, and why they’re important. 4️⃣ The Riddler 🤔 – Questions EVERYTHING. They write down group questions and make predictions based on what’s read. 5️⃣ The Graffiti Artist 🎨 – This student brings the cypher to life through art, music, or acting out the text. This is for the visual learners. 🎭🎶
#🔥NewSchool: Ask your students to list their top 5 songs that connect with the reading. Give them AI tools to explore the relationship between music and scholarship. Let their playlist become the soundtrack for the cypher. 🎧 Even if you’ve got to use the edited version, don’t sweat it. We’re here to stay radical.
#🎤💥ReadyToRevolutionize: If you want more tips on using hip-hop to boost reading comprehension and hit them with some therapeutic vibes, hit me up at DadCypheredutainment.com.
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