Promoting Academic Literacy with Urban Youth through Engaging Hip-hop Culture

We live in a world where diversity has become a valued attribute of education.  Teachers and schools embrace the idea of having students from multicultural backgrounds share their opinions and engage in critical dialogue.  In the article “Promoting Academic Literacy with Urban Youth through Engaging Hip-hop Culture,” Ernest Morrell and Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade suggest that the Hip-hop culture could elicit this critical dialogue amongst the diverse students by catering not only to their interests but also their cognitive capacities.  According to the article, “Hip-hop music is the representative voice of urban youth, since the genre was created by and for them” (Morrell and Duncan-Andrade 88).  Furthermore, it caters to students’ cognitive capabilities because “Hip-hop texts are rich in imagery and metaphor and can be used to teach irony, tone, diction, and point of view” (Morrell and Duncan-Andrade 89). 

The article suggested different ways of incorporating Hip-hop into a “‘traditional’ senior English poetry unit” (90).  The students were assigned a poem from a specific time period (i.e. the Elizabethan Age, the Puritan Revolution, and the Romantics) as well as a corresponding rap song and were asked to prepare an interpretation of their texts.  They were encouraged to find and analyze the linkage between the two.  In addition, the unit granted students agency because they were asked to complete an anthology and write various poems of their own.  Ultimately, the unit fostered critical thinking and dialogue by engaging the students’ interests through Hip-hop and allowing them to make a connection between poetry and the outside world.

This lesson would be a great way of incorporating technology into the English classroom.  Nowadays, anything could be accessed through YouTube and the internet.  Teachers could show students the music videos of relevant songs and ask them to deconstruct the text.  In addition, teachers could utilize Wiki Spaces, which I mentioned in my last blog, by having the students work together in creating their own poems.  Although this lesson incorporates great components of critical pedagogy, there were some aspects of the lesson plan that I would modify.  The article was written in July 2002 and the rappers used throughout the lesson were Nas, Grand Master Flash, and Ice Cube.  These are old-school rappers who are no longer as prominent, with probably the exception of Nas.  In order to implement this lesson, teachers would have to find song writers that are relevant today.  The only issue with that is that we live in a world where music has lost the substance behind it.  The majority of music is strictly geared toward entertainment not creating awareness.
References: Morrell, Ernest, and Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade. “Promoting Academic Literacy with Urban Youth through Engaging Hip-Hop Culture.” English Journal (2002): 88-92. Print.