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SLAM SCHOOL

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface......................................................................................................................vii1 Toward a Critical Hip-Hop and Spoken Word Pedagogy.........................................................................12 "Keepin' It Real": The discourse of Authenticity and the Challenge for Hip-Hop Pedagogies..................................293 The Tale of the Talent Night Rap: Black Popular Culture in Schools and the Challenge of Interpretation.....................634 "Making Sense Out of Worlds that Are Different": Race and Hip-Hop Pedagogies...............................................875 Niggaz, Bitches, and Hoes: Hip-Hop Nation Language as Limit-Case for Education.............................................1136 Pedagogic Futures for Hip-Hop and Spoken Word..............................................................................144Notes........................................................................................................................159Bibliography.................................................................................................................165Index........................................................................................................................179

Chapter One

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. 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 black teachers having declined from 8 to 6 percent since 1991 (Reading Today...