What is necessary for democracy to work effectively?
- A public system of quality education for masses to read and think critically
- Patience and time – a slow, deliberative process
- People voicing their opinions
- Leaders listening and taking into account the needs/opinions of their constituents
- Independent media
- Active and life-long participation, especially non-violent means
- The ability to dissent and protest
Small Group Discussion:
Q: How do we create a critical pedagogy that investigates and utilizes youth culture – its tensions and its possibilities?
- Students as our teachers – they know their lives better than we do; they are the best resources for the themes we need to teach
- Hip-hop as connector to standards-based learning but also for what’s important to our students
- Get students to look at their own culture critically, to ask the questions about the messengers, the message, the marketing, etc.
- Hip-hop isn’t the only cultural expression of our youth; include those in the classroom as well; have rockers bring in their music
- Analytical skills to decipher media images – use media to understand history behind behaviors they see on the screen (e.g. use music videos to look at gender and racial roles; fantasy vs. fact)
- For teachers who may not know the background of hip-hop, how can they become informed? Are there resources – websites? Books? (“Black Rice” Storytellers and griots – mcs in hip-hop; Machiavelli; Divine Forces Radio – progressive radio station – music with positive messages)
- Would be helpful to put together an email list of those resources – Jeff will make this happen!
- With a culture of violence, a reality of violence, is hip-hop the cause? Engage students in discovering what is…
- Find popular music of the day, especially anti-establishment music of the 30’s, 60’s and 70’s, and connect
- Make rhymes out of vocabulary; they take ownership of the words
- Death, murder, drugs, and violence have been around for ages – not new to hip-hop (e.g. Johnny Cash, music of the 60’s)
- Encourage students to bring in song lyrics; they print it out with copies for other students; present it; write about and discuss it – treat it like the poetry it is
- Connect hip-hop to canonical texts by theme
- In a persuasion unit, using hip-hop and advertisements (fallacious arguments); hip-hop’s origins – to take a stand on something important to the community
- There are educators around this city and country interested in these issues, in challenging the dominant paradigms about what’s normal and important in teaching; if we don’t radically rethink what and how we teach, we won’t see radical differences in the students’ lives and performances; importance of this network – we and the students are the experts; we must push each other to hone our arguments; publish! Situate this in educational research, and it bears out that students will learn much better with this type of pedagogy. Get university researchers to document your effective practices.
- Teachers don’t meet, rally, and revolt enough around issues that affect our students.
Resources:
Hip-Hop Poetry and the Classics for the Classroom: Connecting our classic curriculum to Hip-Hop poetry through standards-based language arts instruction, written by Alan Sitomer & Michael Cirelli.
Milk Mug Publishing
9190 W. Olympic Blvd., Suite 253
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
phone (310) 278-1153
ISBN: 0-9721882-2-3
Website: www.HipHopintheClass.com
