Lived Literacies: Popular Music in Higher Education We began this semester discussing how our popular music literacies affect how we know what we know, what we know, and how memory creates images and ideas about life in America.In paper #1, each of you will have the opportunity to explore and communicate some of the ways that your music literacies can help you make the transition to writing in higher education. In paper #1, each of you are invited to explore some aspect of your own popular music literacy history to identify the ways it can be revised and transferred into your life as a writer and/or reader and/or researcher in higher education. Here are some of examples of types of literacy you might explore:
Rreading music: e.g., understanding things about rhythm, tone, interpretation and performance that can assist you as a writer
•How listening to music everyday and memorizing songs can enhance your academic writing
•How thinking/singing/talking/reading in verse allows for expression of things that don’t get expressed in prose and other forms of texts
•Exploring how verse forms help you make new connections between in-school and out-of-school writing
•Analyzing how the moves and emotions of other popular songwriters and/or performers help us understand and deal with audience/readers
•Explain how knowing more than one genre of popular music helps you deal with the various genres of writing you encounter in undergraduate education in America As our discussions about popular songs’ lyrics and music illustrate, there are a number of different ways to focus your paper: working from a significant song(s) or album and its impact on your writing; tracing certain verse forms and their influences on in-school and/or out-of-school reading and/or writing, exploring popular people in music and their lyrics as a way to understand what it means to build historical context from individual events/lives, etc. You can choose any one or any combination of these focusing methods, use one you discovered outside of our readings, or create your own. As you make these decisions, remember that your music literacy history should do more than tell a story or strive for self-expression. Your purpose is to help others with that type of literacy to engage it successfully as they start their college/university educations. This means that you must explore the connections between that type of literacy meeting literacy expectations in higher education. Understanding the significance of what you learn is a common expectation for students in higher education; this assignment will help trace your learning in effective ways.Like each assignment this semester, your paper must include a visual; for this paper your visual will be a cover page that prepares your audience to enter into your text as an engaged reader. You will also want to think about the visual and audio representations of songs that you want included in this paper. Remember, this particular assignment calls for an essay in a fairly traditional academic style. You will have opportunities later in the semester to create other kinds of texts. We will spend a significant amount of time discussing invention, arrangement, revision, style, and delivery (RAIDS) activities for this assignment. Due dates and other requirements such as length and form expectations will be discussed in class
