Hip Hop 1-2-3: using Tupac to teach Chaucer University of California urban education scholar brings hip hop to the classroom to boost academic achievement in writing. by Daniel Gray-Kontar
Teachers rarely employ the elements of hip-hop culture - rap music, break dancing, aerosol art (graffiti) and turntablism (DJing) to engage students academically.
In fact, many educators, activists and hip-hop artists themselves question how they can possibly use hip hop to promote academic achievement, hard work and social responsibility when some of its star artists are convicted criminals who rap and sing about violence, prison culture and raunchy sex.
It's the type of behavior that turns off many looking at the culture from the outside, says Angela Woodson, who as co-chair of the 2004 National Hip-Hop Convention in Newark, N.J., received complaints when rapper Young Buck allegedly stabbed a youth at the Vibe Music Awards in November.
"It's a constant struggle trying to get people to understand the relevance of hip hop when the culture's popular artists engage in that type of behavior."
However, because it is, no doubt, the predominant youth culture of today, a few researchers have begun to use elements of hip-hop culture to engage urban students intellectually, specifically to build writing skills.
Jabari Mahiri, director of the Center for Urban Education at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Education champions the idea. His latest book "What They Don't Learn in School: Literacy and the Lives of Urban Youth" (Peter Lang, 2004) examines the use of popular culture to connect with themes of importance to kids who live in urban settings.
Mahiri identifies connections between the terminology and themes found in hip hop and the types of academic standards that states require and ultimately test students on.
In research conducted in two California high schools, Mahiri found that many of the prevalent themes and writing techniques in Geoffrey Chaucer's classic "The Canterbury Tales" are also found in songs by such contemporary rappers as the late Tupac Shakur.
Mahiri points out that Chaucer's use of language in “The Canterbury Tales” was the vernacular of the common people. The language of the day during Chaucer's time was Latin, but he communicated in Old English, the language of common folk. Mahiri also points out that much of the literature written at the time didn't focus on topics of importance to common people. But “The Canterbury Tales” did.
"If Chaucer were alive today," says Mahiri, "he might be a rapper like Tupac."
By identifying such connections, Mahiri says he was able to "bridge the cultural traffic" that exists between the canonical literature written in medieval England and the street poems written by rappers today.
"With the teaching of writing," explains Mahiri, "you can use texts that are closer to the experiences of urban youth." Here, Mahiri serves as more of a facilitator than lecturer. He exposes students to hip-hop films, magazines and music, and identifies themes students find most important to their everyday lives. Mahiri then incorporates the subject matter into writing assignments that challenge students to communicate the ideas that are familiar to them in coherent, structurally sound writing assignments.
"These are many of the same types of skills standardized tests look for," Mahiri says. "But when you're able to make sense of these kinds of [popular culture] connections, the next step is that you can talk with students about the coherence of their ideas, word choice considerations, etc."
In another example, Mahiri explains how another researcher — University of Michigan Professor of Education Ernest Morrell — paired T.S. Eliot's literary character, J. Alfred Prufrock with rapper Grand Master Flash's song "The Message." A former student of Mahiri's, Morrell found that T.S. Eliot used many of the same poetic devices found in Grandmaster Flash's song. But it wasn't just the similarity in poetic tropes between the two that Morrell found.
"Both Eliot's Prufrock and Grandmaster Flash were looking at their societies as 'wastelands' and they were describing how this made them feel insecure," says Mahiri of Morrell's work. "The point is that both are narratives for how the lives of students connect to society with fairly consistent techniques, so students have a larger buy-in."
In Cleveland, one group coaches teachers to do what Mahiri is doing for math, reaching, science and other subjects. Each summer the Progressive Arts Alliance hosts a teachers camp at Hathaway Brown, a private school in Shaker Heights. At University School, an independent school in suburban Hunting Valley, filmmaker and teacher David Stewart employs hip hop to teach students self-expression during a five-week summer program for 100 boys who attend Cleveland schools. On "Freestyle Fridays" they have a chance to make up raps on any subject they wish. It's a chance to teach life lessons, says Stewart.
To effectively teach language arts using hip hop, Mahiri also offers teachers two pieces of advice. First, he urges teachers to refrain from placing greater value on the canonical literature and less on the contemporary rap and poetry written by urban youth today.
"All texts are multicultural texts," he says. "they all create an opportunity for rich engagements."
In general and just as important, Mahiri observes that the key to successfully using hip hop as a teaching tool lies in the attitude of the teacher.
"There could arise potential conflicts because some students will have more information about popular culture," says Mahiri. "That sometimes raises the insecurities of the teacher [who often sees him or herself] as a knowledge broker. In this context, the teacher is not the only expert in class. The teacher is the guide."