Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Since many students enter college accustomed to strictly structured environments that leave decision-making to others, how do I teach them to think differently? If I tell students to choose protest songs to explore, will they embrace the challenge of uncertainty or feel lost? What meanings will they make when reading lyrics and viewing videos as texts? Will they embrace the songs’ issues? How do I teach them to effectively use evidence from texts that use multimedia, multimodal, multiple intelligences? One certainty: students are plugged in to music. So, I moved to the sidelines, and let hip hop lead the way. I snuck in apt rhetorical strategies/techniques of academic writing/researching; how to evaluate/interpret videos to determine meaning/effectiveness. But students navigated on their own, chose their protest songs, found the issues (bullying, brutality, racism, etc.) in the lyrics, and assessed how a video impacted its message. This paper analyzes a writing class that focuses on protest songs. It examines how students responded to the songs’ lyrics as poetry and politics; explains how students employed their highly technical skills to read, research, and write about the songs; discusses student writing.