Slam School: Learning Through Conflict in the Hip-Hop and Spoken Word Classroom

SLAM SCHOOL

SLAM SCHOOL

LEARNING THROUGH CONFLICT

IN THE HIP-HOP AND

SPOKEN WORD CLASSROOM

BRONWEN E. LOW

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Low, Bronwen E. author.

Slam school : learning through conflict in the hip-hop and spoken word classroom / Bronwen E. Low.

    pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-6365-3 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-8047-6366-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Language arts (Secondary)--Social aspects--United States. 2. Performance poetry--Study and teaching (Secondary)--United States. 3. Education, Secondary--Curricula--United States. 4. Multicultural education--United States. 5. Intergroup relations--United States. 6. Critical pedagogy--United States. 7. Educational anthropology--United States. 8. Hip-hop--United States--Influence. I. Title.

LB1631.L69 2011

428.0071′2--dc22

2010044388

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion

E-book ISBN: 978-0-8047-7753-7

CONTENTS

Preface

1   Toward a Critical Hip-Hop and Spoken Word Pedagogy

2   Keepin’ It Real:

The Discourse of Authenticity and the Challenge for Hip-Hop Pedagogies

3    The Tale of the Talent Night Rap:

Black Popular Culture in Schools and the Challenge of Interpretation

4   Making Sense Out of Worlds that Are Different: Race and Hip-Hop Pedagogies

5   Niggaz, Bitches, and Hoes: Hip-Hop Nation Language as Limit-Case for Education

6   Pedagogic Futures for Hip-Hop and Spoken Word

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

I AM NOT WHAT YOU THINK OF AS HIP-HOP. I am a white, Canadian woman, who at the time of this study had recently moved to the United States to take up an academic position at a private research-intensive college. And neither is Tim.¹ Also white, he is a high school language arts teacher, a haiku poet, runner, and committed bird-watcher who self-admittedly knew nothing about rap music. This disjunction helps explain his students’ surprise when Tim announced that the class would be studying hip-hop and spoken word culture in the last term of their senior year. Then he introduced me as the professor who would be coteaching the class. One student asked if he could borrow a tape-recorder, since there’s a lot going on in the school teachers don’t know about, a situation he was hoping to change. The lot he referred to is the hip-hop poetry, including individual and group (or cipher) improvised freestyling and rapping, which pervades the hallways of urban high schools across the United States but is rarely invited into classrooms. Which doesn’t mean that popular culture, and in this case hip-hop, isn’t already present in schools, shaping the identities of students and therefore how, what, and why they learn.

Tim teaches English, specializing in creative writing, in an urban arts magnet high school in a midsized city in the northeastern United States. In the fall of 2001, I was an assistant professor in a local university’s faculty of education. The university suffers from the elitist reputation problems of similar private institutions located in poor urban centers. I had been studying, in theory, the implications of spoken word and hip-hop culture for youth identities and language practices. I met Tim, and he asked me to help him develop and teach a curriculum grounded in hip-hop culture in two of his senior classes. He had been teaching English and creative writing in the city school district for more than twenty years and felt that his ignorance about rap music and hip-hop culture was a missed opportunity to engage his students. He wanted to become a better communicator to the people I serve.

It should not surprise that Tim felt that his lack of knowledge of hip-hop culture was a deficit in relating to his students. Hip-hop is the single most influential cultural force shaping contemporary urban youth culture in the United States, and its international reach is growing. It includes rapping (the work of the MC), deejaying (or turntablism), graffiti art, and forms of dance such as breakdancing, and it is at the same time a whole culture of style—fashion, idiom, gesture, movement—and sensibility. The culture can offer young people across the spectrum a space of identity-formation and performance, creativity, and political engagement. While its reach is broad, hip-hop has been a particularly important influence on the African American and Latino students who populate Tim’s classes. Rap is the most widespread and commercial branch of a larger movement known as spoken word, a category used to describe forms of poetry and performance in which an artist recites (rather than sings) poetry, often to musical accompaniment that might range from a jazz ensemble to a bongo drummer.

Although I had taught university students for ten years, I had never taught high school, and my work on spoken word culture had been conceptual rather than ethnographic, exploring theories of language and subjectivity in relation to new secondarily oral (Ong 1982) poetic forms such as rap music. I had never discussed such topics with classrooms of adolescents before. The students found what they perceived as a disjunction between my identity as hip-hop fan and researcher and a white woman to be a source of amusement and puzzlement. To boot, I am Canadian, which only heightened my strangeness in the eyes of many students who told me this meant I talked mad proper. My upbringing in Canada also means that I have not grown up on either side of the U.S. racial divide, produced through particular histories of colonization and racism, which are linked to and yet different from Canadian ones. At some points, this disjunction actually seemed to facilitate class activities that asked students to analyze, and thus to partly distance themselves from, the youth and home cultures they inhabited; at others, it interfered with my ability to understand and interpret. That said, these interferences are also part and parcel of all exchanges of teaching and learning, especially in what Pratt (1991) calls the classroom contact zone in which ideas and identities [are] on the line (40); I argue in this book that hip-hop culture can foster this pedagogically productive zone.

I came to hip-hop and spoken word culture after having conducted research at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. I was studying the Jamaican language debates about the public, private, and educational uses of Jamaican Creole versus Standard Jamaican English, where the low level of Standard English literacy skills of many Jamaican students is a longtime source of concern (given that it remains the language of much professional life). However, these debates were complicated by anxieties that many youth were not speaking a language easily characterized as English or Creole. Instead, they were using language greatly influenced by the linguistic experiments of the dancehall rappers (known as DJs in Jamaica), who, according to one critic, so stress their Jamaican Patwah, by exaggerating, stretching, and speeding it up (almost to and sometimes beyond the point of parody), that it is incomprehensible and intimidating to those on the outside (Chude-Sokei 1994, 82). This suggested that the youth were deliberately invoking markers of generational identity and culture rather than speaking less English due to a failure of the educational system (Low 2000). I also learned that a crucial space within which to investigate the evolution of new language forms is youth-driven popular culture.

I brought into a North American context these interests in youth-driven popular language, literacy, and poetic practices as well as their split from those sanctioned by school. In April 1999, I attended the People’s Poetry Gathering, a festival celebrating oral and popular poetic traditions from around the world. As part of the festival, New York City held its first-ever teen slam, a performance poetry mock-Olympic competition that held the boisterous attention of an auditorium filled with young people, hollering their approval and disagreement with the judges’ scoring. Largely through the work of community organizations across the country, including Youth Speaks (which claims to serve approximately two hundred thousand youth annually) in San Francisco and Urban Word in New York City, slam poetry is now a vital and growing social movement across the United States. In 2008, the Brave New Voices International Teen Poetry Slam Finals attracted more than five hundred poets from more than fifty cities.²

Making sense of the dynamism and enthusiasm surrounding that teen slam required an immersion in hip-hop culture, since rap music and the wider hip-hop culture are integral to performance poetry’s relevance and coolness to youth. I gave myself a hip-hop education, starting first with the rich academic theory and journalism on hip-hop and then listening to the music, a backward approach to popular culture. (YouTube, which did not exist when I was first researching hip-hop, now makes this autodidactic process easier.) My hip-hop education was therefore quite unlike that of many hip-hop-generation scholars who have grown up in and through the culture (Hill 2009; Kitwana 2002; Sharpley-Whiting 2007) and so quite naturally use it as a lens for theorizing the world. As Alim (2004) puts it, I was one among a generation of young Hip Hop Headz who spent hours crafting my linguistic skillz and pushin the boundaries of the English language in RHYME CYPHAS and FREESTYLES. Wasn’t no way in the world you could get me to see BL [Black Language] as deficient! (xvi). A hip-hop outsider, I approached my work at the high school as a facilitator rather than as a teacher. I repeatedly described to the students that I was hoping to learn about hip-hop culture in classrooms in order to support other teachers who might want to do something similar, a stance many of the students took quite seriously. One student said of Rashidah, the spoken word poet who was coteaching the class with Tim and me, that she was coming to tell us something about hip-hop poetry, while I was coming to learn more about it, so that was a little different. Tim also approached many of the course materials as a learner, which was pedagogically productive as we shared expertise and interests with students (Callahan and Low 2004).

DEVELOPING AND RESEARCHING A PERFORMANCE POETRY COURSE

Tim and I first decided to develop and coteach the performance poetry course as a six-week unit during the 2002 winter term to his two classes of senior students, all who were seventeen or eighteen years old. One class was a Pacesetter English (PE) course, an alternative to the advanced placement, college-level English classes, designed to help all students achieve national English standards. Tim used the course as an opening in the curriculum to experiment with content and activities that he felt met the objectives of the PE program without being bound to its curricular materials. For instance, in the term prior, Tim collaborated with another university professor to offer a course exploring disability through poetry and fiction. The PE class was a same-sex education option for male students. (There was a similar section for girls concentrating on journalism, offered by another teacher.) Tim called the students in the PE course survivors—students who have not traditionally done well in English, but who have managed to persist into their senior year. Of the twenty-nine boys in the class, twenty-two were African American, three were Latino, and four were white. The second class was Advanced Poetry (AP), a co-ed course that attracted many top academic students in the grade level. Of the nine boys and ten girls in the class, thirteen were white, two were African American, two were Latino, one identified as mixed race, and one was Palestinian American.

Tim had been teaching in the school district for more than twenty years, the last ten in this school. He grew up in a mostly white working-class neighborhood in the area, went to a college in the region, got into the party and counterculture scene, and dropped out for a while in his sophomore year. He then went back partly funded by a track scholarship; as he told the class, he might not have finished university if it had not been for sports. He is still very active and athletic, going to the gym every day before school. Defying any jock stereotypes, Tim’s haiku poetry has been published in creative writing magazines and collections.

In the first year of the poetry course, we invited a local performance poet and teaching artist, Rashidah, to run a performance workshop in the class. She was such an asset to the course that she became a coteacher during the last few weeks of the class, a role that continues in different forms up to the present. A range of national and local arts education grants, with the support of the university where I had been on faculty, has funded her work. Rashidah is African American, university-educated, and a graduate of the city school district. She had a career in communications before she decided to commit herself to urban arts education. She offers slam poetry workshops in many local elementary and high schools and is the cornerstone of the citywide slam poetry scene that she developed in 2006. Rashidah—as a black woman in her late twenties who is an accomplished performance poet with a history of engagement with hip-hop culture and who has strong ties to the popular arts community—was invaluable in giving the course credibility with students. In year one, for instance, we were able to invite her friend, the city’s best-known hip-hop radio DJ, to teach the students about hip-hop history. Rashidah’s experience as a teaching artist also meant she was able to structure and lead performance workshops that helped the students grow as performers. Rashidah is poetry, as one student put it at the end of 2002. Throughout 2003, I maintained regular contact with Tim and Rashidah and attended the slam that concluded that year’s performance poetry course, and in 2004, we resumed our research collaboration, again with a class of senior Pacesetter English students. In the 2004 course, I stepped back from the role of coteacher and concentrated on documenting what happened in the course. That course was term-long and co-ed (it had been all-male in the fall term, but merged with some members of the female course at the beginning of the winter term).

In both years of the research, data collection processes were similar. I audio-recorded every class and in 2002 also video-recorded some of the inclass workshops and the final school poetry slams. I also did on-the-fly interviews with the students, Tim, and Rashidah during the course of the terms, as well as informal, in-depth interviews at the end (Seidman 2006). I took field notes during class, particularly in 2004 when I was more regularly sitting with the students. My data also includes selections of students’ in-class writing, especially their poetry, as well as school documents and the curricular materials prepared by the teachers.

I regularly reviewed the data, often through conversations with Tim and Rashidah, about the class and the students, and I transcribed and coded it using aspects of grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1990). This included open coding at the beginning in relation to themes such as race, language, gender, voice, and poetry vs. rap. I started coding more selectively as it became clear that the theme of conflict was central to what was happening in the classrooms. I picked some key sections from the transcripts and coded them in relation to conflict and tension, using terms such as (mis)understanding, problem, appropriate/acceptable, offense, mistranslation, not knowing, and difference. I then analyzed selected passages through a combination of discourse and critical discourse analysis strategies (Fairclough 2003; Luke 1995) and close-reading methods from literary studies.

Critical discourse analysis sees language as a site of ideological struggle and as both an effect and producer of social change (Fairclough 1992), and it assumes that identities, social relations, and knowledge and belief systems are constructed through language use. It moves dialectically between micro- and macroanalyses of language, from linguistic analysis of vocabulary, syntax, cohesion, and structure, to social-theoretical approaches to discourse that emphasize the role of language in the construction and quality of society and social change. Literary close-reading strategies also involve fine-grained analysis of text, including observations about vocabulary, punctuation, connotation, and denotation, with particular attention to poetic elements of language such as repetition, patterns and absences, rhythm, perspective, imagery, and symbolism. This data collection, review, and analysis process made clear to me that much of the conflict between administrators, teachers, and students involved processes of interpretation and misinterpretation around language, identity, and culture, and that these moments of conflict could be central to learning.

My relationship to hip-hop as a late and intermittent fan means that I am extraordinarily indebted to my teachers, colleagues, and students (overlapping designations) in the field of hip-hop culture and studies. These include the members of Nomadic Massive, and especially Louis Dufieux (Lou Piensa) and Nantali Indongo (Iamblackgirl), Yassin Alsalman (The Narcicyst), Robints Paul (Vox Sambou), Diegal Leger (Rawgged MC), and Alejandro Sepulvede (Ali Sepu). I thank the many scholars I don’t know who have been so formative to my thinking, as well as those I do know, including Bakari Kitwana, Rinaldo Walcott, Samy H. Alim, Awad Ibrahim, Warren Crichlow, Greg Dimitriadis, and in particular SSHRC Montreal/Toronto multilingual hip-hop crew members Mela Sarkar and Lise Winer. I am blessed with other supportive colleagues with similar commitments to schooling and equity, including Claudia Mitchell, Shirley Steinberg, Michael Hoechsmann, Gale Seiler, Anthony Paré, Elisabeth Wood, Jen Gilbert, Chloe Brushwood Rose, Paula Salvio, and Hodari Davis. Thanks also to wonderful graduate students and research assistants who have edited or contributed in some way to the manuscript—Haidee Lefebvre for careful copyediting support, Lena Palacios for insightful editorial feedback, Jon Langdon for transcription and data coding and analysis, as well as Michael Baker, Eloise Tan, and Jacqueline Celemencki. Colleagues who have helped support this ethnographic research project from its inception include Joanne Larson, Judy Fonzi, Meg Callahan, Raffaella Borasi, Sonia James-Wilson, Mary Jane Curry, and Kimberly Healey. Extra special thanks to Tim, Rashidah, the administrators who facilitated our collaboration, and the smart, creative, funny, and critical students in the three classes we worked with; without them this book would not have happened.

Milles mercis, as always, to David for love and support and to my children, Arwen and Beatriz, who are great reminders of the power of imagined identities.

SLAM SCHOOL

1

TOWARD A CRITICAL HIP-HOP AND SPOKEN WORD PEDAGOGY

SLAM SCHOOL examines the dynamics of teaching and learning in three high school classrooms that engaged hip-hop culture. This study does so in order to build a new, possibly counterintuitive, argument: the very reasons teachers and administrators might resist the deliberate introduction of hip-hop into the planned curriculum—the culture’s complex and contradictory politics of representation on issues such as gender, violence, sexuality, materialism, race, and language—are what make hip-hop so pedagogically vital. In 2002 and 2004, I researched, helped develop, and cotaught a senior English performance poetry curriculum that included studies of rap music and hip-hop culture. I worked with Tim, a high school language arts teacher, and Rashidah, a performance poet and arts educator.

The transcripts of classroom interactions, performances, and interviews with students and teachers were rife with stories of conflict and misinterpretation: high school versus popular culture; white teachers and administrators versus black and Latino students; black versus white students; and adults versus adolescents. While such conflicts are routine, they became important catalysts for debate and analysis in our course. Discussion and debate, for instance, about uses of the N-word by hip-hop generation youth brought to the surface some rarely addressed tensions that shape the relations between racially marginalized youth and mainstream education. The spoken word curriculum was a place to air and, at its best, work through these tensions, leading to new insights and understandings for teachers as well as students. This book makes the case for critical hip-hop pedagogies by exploring some of the ways hip-hop’s tricky politics of representation catapulted the classrooms into the center of contemporary cultural debates about culture, language, and identity in real and tangible ways.

The natural order of things in school was also challenged, from the start, by having students’ out-of-school (and hallway) culture become the explicit stuff of curriculum, given that this is usually part of the null curriculum, or what schools don’t teach (Eisner 1994). This move put students in a rare position of curricular authority, testified to by the student’s proud claim that there’s a lot going on in the school teachers don’t know about. The mock-Olympic poetry slams—which served as the course’s culminating experience—highlighted the performance and poetic talents of students who were not usually at the center of the literary stage in the school.

By tackling taboo classroom subjects and drawing on the cultural capital of youth, we worked to flip the script (in hip-hop terms) of the business as usual of traditional schooling. This business includes the explicit curriculum such as course topics, texts, and assessment practices, as well as the hidden curriculum (Apple 1990), a product of structures of teaching and curriculum and the organization and administration of schools. The hidden curriculum’s teachings (including the importance of obedience to authority, punctuality, delayed gratification, as well as the naturalness of competition and hierarchy through systems such as tracking) reflect the values and needs of dominant culture and help produce the systemic underachievement of poor and minority youth.

According to 2003 census materials, 47 percent of the students in this arts magnet high school were African American, 17 percent were Hispanic, and 33 percent were white.¹ There are a larger percentage of white students in the school than across the district at large, in part due to the art magnet school’s reputation, as one student put it, as the district’s baby. In this sense, the school fulfills part of the mission of magnet schools to attract white students to inner-city schools (Orfield, Frankenberg, and Lee 2002). That said, the school was not ranked as high performing in the district’s most recent annual report, based on 2005/2006 data, a designation given only to the district’s science magnet secondary school, but fell instead into the performing/progressing category. In the wider city school district, according to a 2008 report, 65 percent of the students are African American, 21 percent are Hispanic, and 12 percent are white. It is one of the poorest districts in the state, and 50 percent of the schools have a poverty rate of 90 percent or higher, while 88 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (a common poverty index for school researchers). This profile makes the district and school typical of those found in many urban centers across the country. Schools in the United States are actually now more segregated than they were in the early 1970s, prior to the Supreme Court bussing order (Orfield, Frankenberg, and Lee 2002, 17). This resegregation of schooling means, for instance, that the average white kid attends a school that is four-fifths white, and less than 14 percent attend multiracial schools (in which at least three races comprise 10 percent or more of the total student population). The average African American attends a school that is less than one-third white, while the average Latino attends a school where less than half of the students are not Latino (with Latinos being the most segregated minority by race, class, and, increasingly, language) (Orfield, Frankenberg, and Lee 2002, 17).

That Tim is white while his students are predominantly black and Latino is also unremarkable—in a well-established trend in U.S. classrooms, as the student population grows increasingly diverse, the teaching population remains resiliently, and increasingly, white. For instance, data gathered by the National Educational Association indicated that as of 2001, approximately 90 percent of the teaching population was white, with the percentage of