Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to theoretically and empirically capture the cultural divide between education and sport and entertainment in American society. The NCAA Academic Reform Movement has evolved from holding individuals accountable to presently monitoring institutions and their retention and graduation success of college student athletes. This movement will require a deeper examination of how culture influences academic attitudes and lifelong learning. Based on empirical data from different methodologies, this chapter proposes that student athletes; especially African American males, are often stereotyped with few strategies to empower their academic and athletic identities. The Scholar-Baller Paradigm is designed to help athletes escape the stereotyping that confines their talents to athletics and hinders personal, social, cultural, and educational development. The new paradigm extends the dominant athletic visuals to include academic excellence. This reframing must be sensitive to the needs of the student athletes themselves. Part of integrating them into the university community will involve fusing their desires, connections, technologies, and artifacts (including video games, language, and fashions) with academic reform initiatives and policies. A key component of the NCAA Academic Reform Movement is the concept of contemporaneous penalties in which "real-time" evaluations will be made in order to improve the academic retention and matriculation rates of student athletes in all sports. A contemporaneous reward system for academic achievement that acknowledges and extends itself to popular culture should be examined, in addition to traditional recognition artifacts (e.g., trophies, plaques, and certificates). Urban and hip-hop culture have moved into the center of American popular culture. This makes it possible to imagine a synergy of education, sports, and entertainment creating a new paradigm in which athletics, education, and popular culture are united into an indissoluble whole.
Date Created
August 2007
STARS Citation
Harrison, Keith, "Mainstreaming and integrating the substance and spectacle of scholar-baller: A new game plan for the NCAA, higher education and society" (2007). EGS Content. 312.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/egs_content/312
https://works.bepress.com/keith_harrison/2/download/
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