Dr. Mike Dando is celebrating a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to study how youth work together to design an educational space for youth artist-activists together with his co-principal investigator Dr. Lauren Leigh Kelly, of Rutgers-New Brunswick Graduate School of Education.
The $60,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts will be housed at Rutgers and will fund an ethnographic case study of the role of hip-hop-based arts education in facilitating youth community-building, agency and activism. Funds will be used for travel and accommodations for participants and mentors of Rutgers’ Hip Hop Youth Research and Activism Conference as well as research design.
The conference brings high school and college students together to blend art, activism and social justice. Dando and Kelly will research how youth work together to design the conference as an educational space for youth artist-activists to better understand how the participants experienced community, teaching, learning and activism through hip-hop-based education.
The grant is one of 18 Research Grants in the Arts in Support of Examining How Youth Design and Enact their Social, Educational, and Civic Futures Through Arts Activism and Popular Culture projects funded this year.
St. Cloud State is committed to being a university of teacher-scholars through the It’s Time initiative where faculty members integrate their research into new ways of teaching in the classroom and involve students in research at the undergraduate level.
Dando is an English professor at St. Cloud State University with research interests in urban education. He is the university’s 2020 Miller Scholar recipient and studied developing critical multimodal literacies through narrative through the use of maker spaces to explore innovative solutions to problems.
