Professional Book Reviews: Socially Engaged Scholarship: Linking Youth Popular Literacy Practices and Social Justice

This column features the books of colleagues who are both teacher educators and senior scholars in the field of literacy working for social and educational justice. Their work not only calls for engaging youth in intimate and honest conversations about racism, inequality, and social justice using accessible language, but each scholar has made long-term commitments to personally work alongside the African American and Latino youth they aim to learn from using a method of socially engaged scholarship. Collectively, the books reviewed in this column investigate effective practices of incorporating three different genres of youth popular culture to develop students literacies while addressing issues of social import beyond the walls of the classroom: sports—What a Coach Can Teach a Teacher: Lessons Urban Schools Can Learn from a Successful Sports Program, written by Jeff Duncan-Andrade; multimodal media production—Harlem on Our Minds: Place, Race, and the Literacies of Urban Youth, by Valerie Kinloch; and hip hop culture—Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity by Marc Lamont Hill.