David E. Kirkland
David E. Kirkland’s scholarship seeks to center the voices of urban youth by advancing an agenda that will document and theorize the role of urban youth in the social and critical study of language and literacy. In this capacity, Dr. Kirkland has worked closely with urban youth, particularly young Black women and men, to understand deeply how literacy is learned and leveraged between the competing poles of official and unofficial social situations and settings. His research has explored the spoken and written words that urban youth use to construct identities and articulate what he sees as “meaningful lives.” From this perspective, language and literacy play an important role in youth culture and education. Dr. Kirkland believes that, in their language and literacies, youth take on new meanings beginning with a voice and verb, where words when spoken or written have the power to transform the world inside-out.
Degrees Held
- Ph.D.
Michigan State University
2006
Language, Literacy, and Urban Education
Publications
- Kirkland, D. (August, 2009). Researching and teaching English in the digital dimension. Research in the Teaching of English, 44(1), pp. 8-22. (view)
- Kirkland, D. (July, 2009). Skins we ink: Conceptualizing literacy as human practice. English Education, 41 (4), pp. 375-395. (view)
- Kirkland, D. (July, 2009). We real cool: Toward a theory of Black masculine literacies. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(3), pp. 278-297. (view)
- Kirkland, D. (2009). Shaping the digital pen: Media literacy, youth culture, and Myspace. Youth Media Reporter, pp. 188-200.
- Kirkland, D., & Jackson, A. (2008). Beyond the Silence: Instructional Approaches and Students’ Attitudes, pp. 160-180. In J. Scott, D. Y. Straker, & L. Katz (eds.), Affirming Students’ Right to Their Own Language: Bridging Educational Policies and Language/Language Arts Teaching Practices. Champagne/Urbana, IL: NCTE/LEA.
- Kirkland, D. (2008). “The Rose that Grew From Concrete”: Hip Hop and the New English Education. The English Journal, 97 (5), pp. 69-75. (view)
- Miller, s. j., Beliveau, L. B., Kirkland, D., Rice, P., & Destigter, T. (2008). Narratives of Social Justice Teaching: How English Teachers Negotiate Theory and Practice between Preservice and Inservice Spaces. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
- Zhao, Y., Zhang, G., Yang, W., Kirkland, D., Han, X., & Zhang, J. (2008). A comparative study of educational research in China and the U.S. Asian Pacific Journal of Education, 28 (1), pp. 1-17. (view)
- Kirkland, D. (2008). “You must learn”: Promoting hip-hop in education. Youth Media Reporter, 2 (3), pp. 42-46.
- Zhao, Y., Kirkland, D., & Lustick, D. (2007). Introduction. In Y. Zhao, D. Lustick, & W. Yang (eds.), Government, assessment and accountability in the United States: A primer for Chinese educational leaders. Shanghai: East China Normal University Press. English version is also available at: (link)
- Kirkland, D. (2007). The Power of Their Text: Teaching Hip Hop in the Secondary English Classroom. In K. Keaton & P. R. Schmidt (eds.), Closing the Gap: English Educators Address the Tensions between Teacher Preparation and Teaching Writing in Secondary Schools. Language, Literacy, and Learning Series for Information Age Publishing, pp. 129-145. (view)
- Kirkland, D. (2007). Foreword. In M. Diaz & M. Runnell (eds.), Hip Hop Education Guidebook, Volume One. New York: Hip Hop Association.
- Kirkland, D. (2006). The Boys in the Hood: Exploring literacy in the lives of Six Urban Adolescent Black Males. Unpublished Dissertation, Michigan State University, East Lansing.
- Kirkland, D. (2004). Rewriting School: Critical Writing Pedagogies for the Secondary English Classroom. Journal of Teaching of Writing 21(1&2), pp. 83-96. (view)
- Kirkland, D., Robinson, J, Jackson, A., & Smitherman, G. (2004). From “The Lower Economic”: Three Young Brothas and an Old School Womanist Respond to Dr. Bill Cosby. The Black Scholar, 34(4), pp. 10-15. (view)
- Kirkland, D., Jackson, A., & Smitherman, G. (March/April 2001). Leroy, Big D, and Big Daddy Speakin Ebonics on the Internet. American Language Review, pp. 22-26.
- Please see attached CV for complete list of publications, presentations, and courses taught (view)
At NYU, We are Rethinking English Education to Suit the Needs of Today in order to Prepare Youth for Tomorrow
Word Life: A Performance and Conversation on Language, Identity and Power from NYU Steinhardt on Vimeo.
Courses
E11:2045: Hip Hop and the Teaching of English
E11.1030: Literature Seminar for English Education
E11.1589: Teaching English in a Multidialectal Society
E11.2049: Teaching English in the Inner City
E11.2515: Linguistics, Society and the Teacher
E11.2577: Pluralistic Approaches to Cultural Literacy
Research Projects (Most Recent)
“4 Colored Girls” Project
This research explores the storied lives of a group young Black females as recorder in their online social contexts. Over the course of a year, I examined the representational and situational resources that the young women used to tell their specific stories online. Using critical ethnographic and discourse approaches, I illustrate how such narratives do not exist in a neutral female-friendly space. That is, online social communities can be seen as contested sites, layered in the same complexities that constitute the physical and historical geographies in which they are embedded. Hence, the semiotic and symbolic relations of Black feminine iDentity (digital identity) that sometimes get traded to serve perverse and patriarchical pleasures are dangerous when left unexplored. (more )
Digital Underground Project
The Digital Underground Project sought to examine the language and literacy practices of urban youth in online social contexts (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, blogs, wikis, etc.). The project sought to address two questions: (1) Will understanding the ways that urban youth use digital media to practice literacy extend New Literacy Studies (Gee, 1996; New London Group, 1996; Street, 1984, 1995) and reshape our understanding of literacy learning among urban youth? (2) Will it help educators develop curricula and pedagogies capable of transforming academic literacy achievement in urban contexts? To answer these questions, I observed a group of youth in a community center in Brooklyn, NY twice a week for one school year, from September 2007 to June 2008. Data included fieldnotes based on my observations, recorded conversations with participants, and digital textual artifacts (e.g., text messages, instant messages, Facebook and MySpace profiles, etc). Data was interpreted over the course of a year to “ground” a theory of digital literacy that grows out of or that is directly relevant to understanding the role of new media in the literate lives of urban youth. (more )
The Boys in the Hood Project
The “Boys in the Hood” (BIH) project was a three-year ethnographic study, which examined literacy as it was practiced among a group of young Black men in a large Midwestern city. Its purpose was to broaden understandings of literacy by helping researchers better understand literacy in the lives of urban adolescent Black males. The research was guided by the following questions: How is literacy defined among urban adolescent Black males, and what purposes does it serve across multiple social spaces in their lives? Hence, by analyzing discourse—the “socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or social network” (Gee, 1991)—this work profiled by documenting and describing literacy between the achievement gap as successfully practiced by six urban adolescent Black males. (more )
“My Brother’s Keeper” Project
The My Brother’s Keeper (MBK) project, in conjunction with Michigan State University’s African American Language and Literacy Program, explored issues of language, literacy, and identity among a group of adolescent Black males in Detroit, MI. This work sought to understand how the young men of MBK viewed themselves in relation to language and literacy, as larger social and political structures influenced their subjectivities. While the term subjectivity has a variety of histories, it is used here to represent the young men’s ability to (or degree to which they) imagined and shaped their lives. The project has offered a number of findings in relation to youth subjectivity, which have presented at three conferences (Kirkland, 2002, 2005, 2008). This work also comprises two book chapters and two journal articles. Each of these papers feature the unique ways in which young Black men practice literacy. They also help to illustrate a Black masculine school experience, which can be described as both tragic and hopeful. This experience is movingly articulating in the manuscript “A Lesson Before Dying: Reading in the Whispers,” which has been recently submitted for publication.
Areas of Interest (in alphabetical order)
- African American Studies in Education
- Critical & Cultural Studies in Education
- Qualitative Research Methods/Methodologies (Critical Discourse Analysis, Ethnographies of Discourse, and Critical Ethnography)
- Secondary English Education/Adolescent Literacy /Composition Studies
- Urban Education