Associate Professor, Literacy Education
Office: 107B Schindler Education Center, Department of Curriculum & Instruction
Phone: (319) 273-2629
Email: shuaib.meacham@uni.edu
Education: Ph.D. (Language and Literacy), University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Research Interests: Hiphop integration in literacy education, Multicultural education, Diversity issues in teacher education
Dr. Shuaib Meacham (“Meach”) didn’t know much about hip hop when he began his career in literacy education. Having worked with youths in Denver, Colorado, Delaware, and now in Iowa for the past two decades, Meach has become a nationally-recognized specialist in hip hop literacy. His work examines how this musical art form engages young people and gives kids--who might be turned off of formal education-- powerful experiences with language and literacy that deeply enhance their reading and writing. “When you look at what's required to write hip hop lyrics compared to other popular music,” Meach says, “hip hop is more artistically and linguistically demanding. Regular traditional pop music contains verses, hooks, and choruses, with a lot of repetition. With hip hop, you have to write more lyrical content to fulfill the requirements for hip hop songs, and that means greater engagement with literacy and language.” Today, Meach concentrates his research in three main areas: hip hop integration in literacy education, multicultural education, and diversity issues in teacher education. A champion of community engagement, Meach also co-directs Hip Hop Literacy 319, a team of Cedar Valley youth who write, perform, and record hip hop music.
As a literacy educator who is also African American, Meach brings a much needed cultural perspective to his mostly white Iowa students in the College of Education “We teach students at UNI who often come from rural parts of the state and have very little exposure to cultures and ways of life and perspectives, other than their own,” Meach explains. “I’ve had to find more and more creative ways to expose my College of Education students to other ways of life, and to help them see how differences are actually learning resources that they need to draw from.” To put theory to practice, Meach regularly integrates the Hip Hop Literacy 319 youth team into his teaching and research, and works tirelessly to bring diversity issues to the forefront of educational discourse. One of his recent community outreach projects, “Diversity Is Our Strength,” celebrates educational diversity through the stories of nearly 60 Cedar Valley educators and students, which was accompanied by a large wheat paste mural installation on the side of a Waterloo, IA.
Meach grew up in a family with deep roots in education and literacy. His grandmother got her teaching degree from Fisk University in the early 1900s; his great uncle graduated from Oberlin in the 1930s and then earned his Ph.D. in Christian Education and Sociology, and his father was a classroom middle school teacher. Surrounded by educators, books, and ideas about reading, it is no surprise that Meach would become a literacy scholar; however, his route to academia was circuitous.
After graduating from college with a degree in creative writing and literature, Meach joined the Navy in the early 1980s and was stationed aboard an aircraft carrier. There, he found the ship had a very good library and he would walk around the ship with an armful of books. At first, Meach’s shipmates (many African American like himself) asked him “Why all the books?”, and then they started investigating the library themselves. On the ship, Meach and his shipmates began a sort of book club, “a really amazing kind of Moveable Feast of conversations during mealtimes where we would just talk about our books and how they were helping us make sense of America as black men.” He found in his company these brilliant young men who had never even thought about going to college and yet were so astute, so eager to learn, and with amazing promise. Meach began wondering how we can improve reading education so that young brilliant young men like his shipmates could see college as a logical destination. He decided to pursue a Master’s in Reading Education at the University of Michigan and to focus on the understudied area of African American literacy. In doing so, Meach found a literacy field catering to individual cultural groups rather than to what he was seeing--classrooms representing a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds. “What do you do about maximizing the effectiveness of literacy instruction in that situation,” he asked. His dissertation examined one teacher who navigated 11 different cultures and languages in her classroom, and her ability to create classroom community and effective literacy instruction in that kind of environment.
After earning a Ph.D. in Language and Literacy at the University of Illinois, Meach’s work took him to the University of Colorado/Boulder, where he studied the substantial black and Mexican student populations in nearby Denver. While there, he became interested in community engagement after witnessing the high quality poetry performed by youth open mic poetry club--it was a safe creative space far from formal education. “I’ll never forget one guy who got up to the mic and just took a ball of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it, and performed this powerful poem,” he said. “There were a lot of young people in their late teens and early 20s who were a part of that literacy community, with a tremendous interest in poetry, and language, and hip hop.”
By bringing student groups to campus, Meach introduced in-service and pre-service teachers to young peoples’ enthusiasm and passion for poetry. Soon, he began to listen to what these youth groups were listening to--hip hop--and became interested in hip hop’s rich interplay with other texts--such as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. These experiences opened Meach up to the whole idea of hip hop being an especially powerful literacy learning resource, and soon he was developing curriculum alongside exceptional, established hip hop artists. For Meach, hip hop literacy challenged the existing educational discourse that black and Latino students weren’t interested in reading and writing. He and his doctoral students were proving otherwise.
Meach moved to the University of Delaware (for family reasons) and took the study of hip hop literacy further. In teaching an experimental doctoral class, he and his students explored hip hop as a musical artform (including beat boxing and freestyling), read books about hip hop artists, and investigated links between hip hop and literacy (interestingly, First Lady Jill Biden was in this class). Meach and his graduate students also began identifying more informal literacy practices--for example, the same kids who were performing poorly in their English classrooms were banging out sophisticated beats in their lunchroom cafeteria and experimenting with sophisticated levels of language use through hip hop music lyrics. Meach was fascinated how groups of kids could take any given topic and, within minutes, create powerful poems that were both written down, memorized, and placed into hip hop compositions. He also noted that it made a huge difference to these kids when their informal literacy was recognized and validated. Through a hip hop education program created by one of Meach’s doctoral students, 100% of the participants graduated from high school and then went on to college--affirming what Meach’s research was suggesting: that hip hop literacy, when embraced and encouraged as a literacy stepping stone, improves school literacy.
Meach is currently interested in design thinking, an problem-solving approach oriented around identifying and solving problems or needs from the user's perspective. He is now seeing possibilities for design thinking in all aspects of hip-hop culture. Through a more design-infused approach, Meach hopes to take Hip Hop Literacy beyond writing their own lyrics, to have the artists record their own music, produce their own CDs, use social media marketing websites, put on their own fashion and musical events, and use their hip hop skills to make money in ways far more empowering than service industry jobs. “What I began to see was not only the reading and the writing, but how hip hop is a productive culture,” he said. “If you're not growing, if you're not producing, there's really no place for you. And it's multifaceted: the verbal element of hip hop is connected to people who know music technology and also to people who know the performance disciplines, and they bring their skills together to produce works of hip hop art. That's what started to capture my imagination.”
Meach surmises that what really readies his hip hop literacy kids for college is their ability to engage in both design and civic thinking. As a group, they collaborate to produce concerts; organize social justice events (e.g., an anti violence rally); travel around the country and the world performing at different colleges, universities, and youth events; they’ve also engaged with people working in the music industry who have college degrees. Hip hop literacy is about language experimentation, problem solving, and group communication. As a UNI College of Business said to him, if the Hip Hop Literacy artists develop the variety of skills necessary to successfully produce and promote their own music, there wouldn’t be a business in the Cedar Valley who would not want to hire them to apply those skills to their business, or a college or university that would not want them on their campus.