Practice Source A

The following source is NOT a source you will find in your actual synthesis packet; however, it is a source that is related to the packet's topic of Hip Hop in some way. Please read the source and then answer the following questions in a comment to this post:

1. What is the source's SOAPSTone?
2. What type of source is this?
3. How does the information from this source relate to the prompt?
4. How could the information from this source be used in your synthesis (if you were to go with the main claim you drafted in a previous post)?

Hip Hop as an Instructional Tool

(Excerpt from "Using Hip Hop Culture to Motivate Millenial Students" by professors at the University of the Sacred Heart and the University of Puerto Rico in 2006)

Our students use Hip Hop to study. An alumnus of Stanford University told me that in order to pass a calculus course, he wrote all of the calculus formulas and equations into a rhyme and learned them that way. Our students use Hip Hop to complete homework assignments and projects. One of my students took a rhyme that he had written and turned it into an academic essay for a writing assignment. Our students use Hip Hop in personal ways within the academy. Students have written me notes on which they tagged their names for signatures and tagged my name in the salutations. Students sign attendance sheets with tags and they tag their names on assignments which they submit. Several years ago, while writing the essay section of his entrance placement examination, a student at Bergen Community College asked if his response could be a rhyme instead of an essay.

Because it a part of their youth culture and primary Discourse, Hip Hop can be utilized as an innovative classroom instructional tool. In our writing classes, where we introduce students to the writing process, if there are students who are emcees, we collaborate in instructing the class with the emcees explaining the writing process to the class. Knowing this process intimately, Hip Hop emcees employ the writing process when they create and compose their rhymes. Another example of its collaborative instructional value is to introduce documentation of sources and research to a class with student emcees discussing “why they do not bite other emcees’ lyrics;” that is, why they do not plagiarize the lyrics of others. Put in this context, other students quickly understand why they cannot plagiarize. At the 2005 Conference of the College Language Association held at the University of Georgia in Athens, Kelli Weiss, a doctoral student at Howard University, discussed using Hip Hop lyrics in her freshman writing classes to teach the relationship of the thesis statement to the body of the essay. As an instructional tool, Hip Hop can be utilized in other ways in the writing classroom and in other disciplines, as well. The following articles are examples of using this culture in the literature classroom, the sociology and criminology classrooms, and in counseling groups of students.