Deeper Than Rap: Expanding Conceptions of Hip-Hop Culture and Pedagogy in the English Language Arts Classroom
2017; Routledge; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1943-2348
Autores Tópico(s)Multilingual Education and Policy
ResumoStanding outside my conference room at the 2014 National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention, I was approached by a white, female high school English teacher from Portland, Oregon. She inquired about how to use Macklemore and Iggy Azalea to teach her predominantly white high school students the differences between cultural exchange and cultural appropriation. We met a black, male English teacher working in a prestigious independent school in suburban Philadelphia. He wanted to know if I, a black, male, self-identified pedagogue, considered him to be an Uncle Tom for using Bobby Shmurda (a New York rapper currently arraigned on conspiracy, reckless endangerment, and weapons and drug charges) as a modern-day example of cooning. We were joined for lunch by a Portuguese-Jamaican middle school teacher working in a predominantly black Catholic school in Newark. Her administrators explicitly prohibited her from integrating texts into her curriculum; however, she knew that her school's hip-hop policies could not stop her students from bringing hiphop culture into her classroom.These conversations reflect some of the pressing issues based (HHBE; Hill, 2009) research in English education is wrestling with at this historical juncture. Twenty-five years ago, we were asking if was a legitimate form worthy of canonization (Jeremiah, 1992; Powell, 1991). Ten years ago, we were asking, it work? and What does working mean? Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2002) showed how texts served to broaden students' grasp of literary terms and figurative language in a traditional 12th-grade poetry class in Northern California. Hill (2009) explained how critical readings of rap lyrics provide opportunities to negotiate complex lines of racial, aesthetic, class, and generational authenticity in his Hip-hop Lit course for troubled youth. The conversations I had at the NCTE conference echo Irby, Hall, and Hill's (2013) recent findings that teachers no longer need to be sold on why they should be using hiphop in the classroom; they want to be told how to use in the classroom. This has led me and many other scholars personally and professionally vested in the crossroads of and teacher education to query: Should they bring these notions of into the classroom? And, should we teach them how to do so?In this Forum article, I argue that the future of HHBE research in English education demands moving beyond making a case for hip-hop's pedagogical merits and toward helping teachers put models of HHBE into action, given their various intersectional situations. With the trepidations of inservice and preservice English teachers-as well as fellow scholars-in mind, I begin by addressing practical and philosophical dilemmas regarding the role, purpose, and function of hip-hop-based curricular interventions in this era of the Common Core State Standards. From there, I seek to shift the conversation from as content to a more complex unit of analysis that Petchauer (2013) refers to as aesthetics. After briefly describing the aesthetic forms of freestyling and ciphering, I call for further research into how the 'ways of doing and being' [found] in the sonic, kinesthetic, linguistic, and visual practices/expressions of hip-hop (Petchauer, 2015, p. 79) can serve a discipline devoted to reading, writing, speaking, viewing, and listening. As the title of the article suggests, culture and pedagogy are more than just rap music and textual analysis. Ultimately, my goal is to inspire teachers, teacher educators, and researchers to think more broadly and deeply about the ways cultural knowledge can remix (Knobel & Lankshear, 2008) not only conceptions of literary and informational texts in the ELA classroom, but composition and participation as well.HHBE Sounds Nice, but Where Does It Fit within the Common Core? …
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