he Digest of Education Statistics forecasts that, during the next decade, the number

of ethnic minority teachers will shrink to 5 percent, while the enrollment of ethnic mi-

nority children in America’s schools will grow to 41 percent. As classrooms across the

country become increasingly diverse, determining how to connect in significant ways

across multiple lines of difference may be the greatest challenge facing teachers today. Teach-

ers in new century schools must meet this challenge and find ways to forge meaningful rela-

tionships with students who come from different worlds, while also helping these students

Promoting Academic Literacywith Urban Youth throughEngaging Hip-hop Culture

develop academic skills and the skills needed to be-come critical citizens in a multicultural democracy.This challenge also presents a tremendous oppor-tunity for progressive, critical educators who wish topromote curricula and pedagogies that value and af-firm the cultural practices of urban students andmembers of urban communities.

As English teachers at an urban high schoolin northern California, we witnessed the impact ofHip-hop music and culture on all of our students.We saw at the same time that its influence seemedto transcend race, as students from a variety of eth-nic backgrounds were strongly influenced by theculture (Mahiri). At the same time, through lookingat the literacy practices associated with engagement(Barton and Hamilton 7–15), we also saw that stu-dents in this non-mainstream cultural practice (Fer-dman 181–204) were exhibiting the critical andanalytical skills that we wanted them to bring to aca-demic texts from the canon. We ultimately decidedthat we could utilize Hip-hop music and culture toforge a common and critical discourse that was cen-tered upon the lives of the students, yet transcendedthe racial divide and allowed us to tap into students’lives in ways that promoted academic literacy andcritical consciousness.

Baker, Farley, and George all argue that thecreative people who are talking about youth culturein a way that makes sense happen to be rappers, andthe youth are responding in many ways. Hip-hopartists sold more than 81 million CDs, tapes, and al-bums in 1998, more than any other genre of music.Although Hip-hop got its start in black America,more than 70 percent of albums are purchased bywhites. Taking their cue from the music industry,other major corporations are creating advertisingcampaigns that cater to the “Hip-hop generation.”Even mainstream Hollywood, with films such asWarren Beatty’s Bulworth, is dealing with issues re-lated to Hip-hop. Although the music is largely crit-icized by politicians, religious groups, and somewomen’s groups, its proponents claim that it is hereto stay, as it represents a resistant voice of urbanyouth through its articulation of problems that thisgeneration and all Americans face on a daily basis.

Rose and Powell argue strongly that Hip-hopmusic is the representative voice of urban youth,since the genre was created by and for them. Pow-ell states:

[Rap] emerged from the streets of inner-cityneighborhoods as a genuine reflection of thehopes, concerns, and aspirations of urban Black

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youth in this, the last quarter of the 20th century.Rap is essentially a homemade, street-level musi-cal genre . . . Rap lyrics concentrate primarily onthe contemporary African American experience. . . Every issue within the Black community is sub-ject to exposition in the rap arena. Hit rap tuneshave broached touchy subjects such as sex, sexism,racism, and crime . . . Rap artists, they contend,“don’t talk that love stuff, but [rather] educate thelisteners.” (245)

Many rappers consider themselves as educators andsee at least a portion of their mission as promotingconsciousness within their communities (Lipsitz23–48, Rose 277–91). As articulated by Freire, theraising of critical consciousness in people who havebeen oppressed is a first step in helping them to ob-tain critical literacy and, ultimately, liberation fromoppressive ideologies. The influence of rap as a voiceof resistance and liberation for urban youth prolif-erates through such artists as Lauryn Hill, Pras,Wyclef Jean of the Refugee Camp, Public Enemy,Nas, and Mos Def, who endeavor to bring an accu-rate yet critical depiction of the urban situation to aHip-hop generation.

Giroux (27–28, 31) takes a much less cele-bratory view of the impact of Hip-hop culture onworking-class urban youth but, nevertheless, agreesthat it is a worthy topic of study in urban schools.His work addresses the crisis confronting youth,whom he labels a generation under siege, wherethey are enmeshed in a culture of violence coded byrace and class. He speaks to the negative connota-tions of youth culture promoted in popular mediathat propel youth toward mistrust, alienation, misog-yny, violence, apathy, and the development of fugi-tive cultures. This same media, he contends, hascommercialized the working class body and crimi-nalized black youth. Critical educators, he argues,must consider elements of popular culture such asHip-hop music as a serious site for social knowledgeto be discussed, interrogated, and critiqued.Whether the power in its messages can be used forgood or ill, few can dispute the impact of Hip-hopculture on the lives of working class urban youth.

We further argue that Hip-hop texts are lit-erary texts and can be used to scaffold literary termsand concepts and ultimately foster literary inter-pretations. Hip-hop texts are rich in imagery andmetaphor and can be used to teach irony, tone, dic-tion, and point of view. Also, Hip-hop texts can beanalyzed for theme, motif, plot, and character de-

velopment. It is possible to perform feminist, Marx-ist, structuralist, psychoanalytic, or postmodernistcritiques of particular Hip-hop texts, the genre as awhole, or subgenres such as “gangsta” rap. As Leepoints out, once learned, these analytic and inter-pretative tools developed through engagement withpopular cultural texts can be applied to canonicaltexts as well. If one goal of critical educators is toempower urban students to analyze complex literarytexts, Hip-hop can be used as a bridge linking theseemingly vast span between the streets and theworld of academics. Hip-hop texts, given their the-matic nature, can be equally valuable as spring-boards for critical discussions about contemporaryissues facing urban youth. Provocative rap texts canbe brought into the classroom, and discussion top-ics may be produced from a listening/reading of thetext. These discussions may lead to more thoughtfulanalyses, which could translate into expository writ-ing, the production of poetic texts, or a commitmentto social action for community empowerment.

Whether the power in its messages

can be used for good or ill,

few can dispute the impact

of Hip-hop culture on the lives

of working class urban youth.

Teaching Hip-hop as a music and culture ofresistance can facilitate the development of criticalconsciousness in urban youth. Analyzing the criticalsocial commentary produced by the Refugee Camp,Public Enemy, or Nas may lead to consciousness-raising discussions, essays, and research projects at-tempting to locate an explanation for the currentstate of affairs for urban youngsters. The knowledgereflected in these lyrics could engender discussionsof esteem, power, place, and purpose or encouragestudents to further their own knowledge of urbansociology and politics. In this way, Hip-hop musicshould stand on its own merit in the academy andbe a worthy subject of study in its own right rather

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than necessarily leading to something more “ac-ceptable” like a Shakespeare text. It can, however,serve as a bridge between urban cultures and theliterary canon.

Given the social, cultural, and academic rel-evance of Hip-hop music and culture, we designeda classroom unit with three objectives:

1. to utilize our students’ involvement withHip-hop culture to scaffold the critical andanalytical skills that they already possess

2. to provide students with the awareness andconfidence they need to transfer theseskills into/onto the literary texts from the canon

3. to enable students to critique the messagessent to them through the popular culturalmedia that permeate their everyday lives

The unit was designed to incorporate Hip-hop music into a “traditional” senior English poetryunit. Our desires were to increase motivation andparticipation in discussions and assignments and toteach critical essay writing and literary terminologyin the context of, among other types of poetry, rapmusic. We also wanted to situate Hip-hop histori-cally and socially and discuss its inception as a re-sponse to urban post-industrialism. Further, wewished to encourage youth to view elements of pop-ular culture through a critical lens and to critiquemessages sent to them through popular media, aswell as to help students understand the intellectualintegrity, literary merit, and social critique containedwithin elements of their own youth culture.

The second major portion

of the unit involved a group

presentation of a canonical poem

along with a Hip-hop text.

Several goals and objectives for this unitcombined our simultaneous agendas of tapping intopopular culture and facilitating academic and criti-cal literacy development. To accomplish this, weneeded to cover the poetry of the Elizabethan Age,

the Puritan Revolution, and the Romantics, whichwere part of the district-mandated curriculum fortwelfth grade English and which they would be ex-pected to have knowledge of for the AdvancedPlacement exam and college English. It was also im-portant to learn about the poets in the context of theliterary and historical periods in which they wroteto gain a greater understanding of the role poetryplays as a critique of its contemporary society.

In addition to a critical exposure to the liter-ary canon, we felt it important to concentrate on thedevelopment of issues and ideas presented in poetryand song as a vehicle to expository writing. Our ob-jectives were as follows:

• to develop oral and written debate skills• to facilitate the ability to work in groups• to help students to deliver formal public

presentations• to teach students how to critique a

poem/song in a critical essay• to help students develop note-taking skills

in lectures and presentations• to help students become comfortable writ-

ing in different poetic forms such as thesonnet, elegy, and ballad

We began the unit with an overview of po-etry in general, attempting to redefine poetry andthe role of the poet in society. We emphasized theimportance of understanding the historical periodin which a poem was written to come to a deeper in-terpretation of the poem. In the introductory lec-ture, we outlined all of the historical/literary periodsthat would be covered in the unit (Elizabethan, Pu-ritan Revolution, Romantic and Metaphysical Poetsfrom England, Civil War, Harlem Renaissance,Civil Rights Movement, and Post-Industrial Rev-olution in the United States). It was our intentionto place Hip-hop music—as a post-industrial artform—right alongside these other historical peri-ods and poems so that the students would be ableto use a period and genre of poetry they were fa-miliar with as a lens with which to examine theother literary works and also to encourage the stu-dents to reevaluate the manner in which they viewelements of their popular culture.

The second major portion of the unit in-volved a group presentation of a canonical poemalong with a Hip-hop text. The groups were com-missioned to prepare a justifiable interpretation oftheir texts, situating each within its specific histori-

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cal and literary period, while also analyzing the link-ages between the two. There were eight groups forthis portion who were, after a week of preparation,each given a day to present to the class and havetheir arguments critiqued by their peers. The groupswere assigned as follows:

Group Poem Song

1 “Kubla Khan,” “If I Ruled the Coleridge World,” Nas

2 “Love Song of J. Alfred “The Message,”Prufrock,” Eliot Grand Master Flash

3 “O Me! O Life!”, “Don’t Believe the Whitman Hype,” Public Enemy

4 “Immigrants in Our “The World Is a Own Land,” Baca Ghetto,” Geto Boys

5 “Sonnet 29,” “Affirmative Action,” Shakespeare Nas

6 “The Canonization,” “Manifest,” Refugee Donne Camp

7 “Repulse Bay,” “Good Day,” Chin Ice Cube

8 “Still I Rise,” Angelou “Cell Therapy,”Goodie Mob

Other poems used for this unit were “Let AmericaBe America Again” by Langston Hughes and “ElegyWritten in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray.

In addition to the group presentations, stu-dents were asked to complete an anthology of tenpoems that contained an elegy, a ballad, a sonnet,and a poem that described a place with which theywere familiar. The title of the poem was to be theplace that was featured. Also, the students wereasked to write a poem that conveyed a mood; apoem that dealt with a political, social, or eco-nomic problem that was important to them (e.g.,racism, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, police bru-tality, poverty, homelessness); a love poem; a poemthat celebrated a particular facet of life (e.g., firstdate, summertime, graduation); and two openpoems that dealt with whatever subject studentswanted and written in any style they desired. Fol-lowing the group presentations, we held a poetryreading, where each student selected five originalpoems to read for the class, giving brief commentson each poem such as the context or a specialmeaning. For the outside of class assignment, stu-dents were allowed to pick any song of their choiceand write a five-to-seven page critical essay on that

song. They were also required to submit a tran-scription of the song.

The unit was consistent with the original goalsof being culturally and socially relevant, critically ex-posing students to the literary canon, and facilitatingthe development of college-level expository writing.The positioning of Hip-hop as a genre of poetrywritten largely in response to post-industrialismwas a concept to which the students were able torelate. The issues of joblessness, poverty, rage, andalienation all had resonance to the urban youth cul-ture of which the students were all a part. The fore-fronting of Hip-hop as a genre of poetry alsohelped to facilitate the transition to understandingthe role individual poets may have played in theirown societies.

The students were able to generate some ex-cellent interpretations as well as make interestinglinkages between the canonical poems and the raptexts. For instance, one group articulated that bothGrand Master Flash and T.S. Eliot gazed out intotheir rapidly deteriorating societies and saw a“wasteland.” Both poets were essentially apocalyp-tic in nature as they witnessed death, disease, anddecay. Also, both poems talk about a message, indi-cating the role of a poet in society as a messenger orprophet. Another group discussed the role of alle-gory in their two texts, where both John Donne andthe artists from the Refugee Camp utilize relation-ships with lovers to symbolize the love and agonypoets can feel for their societies.

The unit was consistent with the basic tenetsof critical pedagogy in that it was situated in the ex-periences of the students (as opposed to those ofthe teacher), called for critical dialogue and a crit-ical engagement of the text, and related the texts tolarger social and political issues. The students werenot only engaged and able to use this expertise andpositionality as subjects of the post-industrial worldto make powerful connections to canonical texts,they were also able to have fun learning about aculture and a genre of music with which they hadgreat familiarity. Ultimately, our experiences in-troducing Hip-hop and other elements of popularculture into traditional curricula lead us to believethat there are countless possibilities for urban ed-ucators who wish to jump outside the box and tapinto the worlds of their students in order to makemore powerful connections with traditional aca-demic texts and affirm, in meaningful ways, theeveryday lives of those they teach.

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Works Cited

Baker, Houston A. Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Barton, David, and Mary Hamilton. “Literacy Practices.” Sit-uated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context.Eds. David Barton, Mary Hamilton, and R. Ivanic.New York: Routledge, 2000. 7–15.

Digest of Education Statistics. Washington, DC: NationalCenter for Education Statistics, 1998.

Farley, Chris. “Hip-hop Nation: There’s More to Rap thanJust Rhythms and Rhymes. After Two Decades, itHas Transformed the Culture of America.” Time153.5 (1999): 55–65.

Ferdman, Bernardo. “Literacy and Cultural Identity.” Har-vard Educational Review 60.2 (1990): 181–204.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Con-tinuum, 1970.

George, Nelson. hiphopamerica. New York: Penguin Put-nam, 1999.

Giroux, Henry A. Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence, andYouth. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Lee, Carol D. Signifying as a Scaffold for Literary Interpre-tation: The Pedagogical Implications of an African-

American Discourse Genre. Urbana, IL: NCTE,1993.

Lipsitz, George. “History, Hip-hop, and the Post-ColonialPolitics of Sound.” Dangerous Crossroads: PopularMusic, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place.New York: Verso, 1994. 23–48.

Mahiri, Jabari. Shooting for Excellence: African Americanand Youth Culture in New Century Schools. NewYork: Teachers College Press, 1998.

Nas. It Was Written. New York: Columbia Records, 1996.Powell, Catherine T. “Rap Music: An Education with a Beat

from the Street.” Journal of Negro Education 60.3(1991): 245–59.

The Refugee Camp. The Score. New York: ColumbiaRecords, 1996.

Rose, Tricia. “Fear of a Black Planet: Rap Music and BlackCultural Politics in the 1990s.” Journal of Negro Ed-ucation 60.3 (1991): 277–91.

ERNEST MORRELL teaches in the Department of TeacherEducation at Michigan State University, East Lansing. JEF-FREY M. R. DUNCAN-ANDRADE is a doctoral candidate inthe Graduate School of Education at the University of Cali-fornia, Berkeley.

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Teachers Withhold Judgment, Gain Respect

“Isn’t it true that those teachers we learned to respect and grew to love never saw us as interchangeable faces or invio-late numbers spawned by testing agencies and nurtured in guidance departments? They never presumed to predeter-mine our station in life, never tagged us as ‘promiscuous gum-snapping hairdresser’ or ‘hung-over auto mechanic.’ Thebest teachers, if they judged us at all, did not look to others for that judgment. They saw not what we appeared to bebut what, in truth, we were, and more importantly, what kinds of humane beings we might become.”

Charles F. Greiner. “Humanizing Education: The Possible Dream.” EJ 66.8 (1977): 28–31.

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