Templeton.curriculumTheory.fall.2012.Draft2

Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE

Curriculum Theory Conduit: Hip Hop Culture and Second Language Acquisition in English as a Second

Language Critical Pedagogy

Delivered in part as a cognate project preparation paper

By

Alexander S. Templeton, M.Ed.

For

Dr. Perry Marker

EDCT 585 – Curriculum Theory

Sonoma State University

Fall 2012

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Introduction

This report explores intersections between transgressive theories abound in Hip Hop and its

praxis for teaching English to speakers of other languages through critical pedagogy. Throughout the

exploration of these intersections, I compare post-modernist theory alongside, and against, one main

author in transgressive theory and language teaching Alastair Pennycook, (2007a), exploring elements

and highlights that interweave curriculum theorists from the existentialist, pragmatist, and offering

reflection and contrasts against the idealist and perennialist paradigm. Some core arguments

surrounding Hip Hop pedagogy, Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and post-modern/transgressive

theory, critical pedagogy within the research are offered. Examples of student-centered and

constructivism carry the foci for instructional perspectives, and underlie the report’s aim to support

cognate project curriculum planning currently underway.

Extra criteria is clearly delineated by including information from one of five questionnaires

revolving around semiotic language and socially mediated processes in sociocultural theory of learning

(see Appendix A), that were distributed to youth, ages 7 to 17, who study under a local “B-Boy” (original

Hip Hop Break Dance) teacher. Only one completed student survey was collected (see attached),

however. However, one questionnaire was collected that elicited information via phone from one

scholarly and professional Hip Hop educator Fabien “Farbeon” Saucedo (2011, 2012a, 2012b),

surrounding transgressive pedagogy for English as a second Language (ESL) teaching, and language

development (see Appendix B). This extra criteria is weaved throughout the report, while it seeks to

elaborate how critical pedagogy involves a “phonocentric” tradition in contrast to the “logo centric”

tradition as an “inclusionary approach to education in which the languages and cultures of students are

seen to be essential part of any curriculum”, (Pennycook, 2007, p. 144). This is essential for sociocultural

teaching using semiotic language and socially mediated processes in second language learning.

Furthermore, the scope of this report is not aimed at debunking American monolingual

educational policy, or protesting NCLB specifically, but instead focuses on the previously mentioned

intersections through a structural-functional hypothesis within the social theory framework. Describing

curriculum theory paradigm shifts, it also argues that the main goal of American schools is certain

stability, with little attenuation of education towards social mobility or sustainability for language

ecology. Language ecology is of the mindset that learners and speakers can create “relationship of

possibility” or affordances (van Lier 2004: 105) for new ventures of interaction, and the language

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evolutions that require them, (Kramsch & Whitehead, 2008, p. 313). Language ecology is not a

parameter explored in depth within this report, as curriculum theory is, but it offers one point of

introduction. Critical pedagogy situates linguistic hegemony in monolingual schooling as oppressive and

“empowerment of the poor has transcended boundaries based on language and culture and been

embraced throughout the world by people seeking insights and ways to alleviate and respond to

oppression”, (Noguera, 2007, para 3). Without proposing macro solutions adequately to account for

social change in a tautological fashion (Fouche, 2012), this report instead justifies the theoretical and

pragmatic intersections, and saves arguments framed within oppression for the cognate GS01 proposal

outside this report’s scope.

Moreover, provided are five physical artifacts from my practice of Hip Hop and using it to teach

in my experience. The first 1) is a Hip Hop song performed live by me (with lyrics provided – see

Appendix C) to show performativity as one of many modalities of learning and forming language within

inter and intra/personal -- communication. The second 2) is the book Tupac Resurrection (Shakur, 2006),

which I have used to teach language through dialogue, creative storytelling, constructive grammar in

context, and symbolic language through textual analysis, poetry, and language arts. The third 3) is

YouTube music video entitled “Work it out”, by The Dave Matthews Band and Hip Hop group Jurassic 5.

It depicts a culmination of music, lyricism, parody, social commentary, and political humor through

positive interactions and messages, as a symbiosis of these elements in Hip Hop as a starting point in

discussing critical media literacy, popular culture, political and social messages, and alternative

undercurrents. The fourth 4) is a flyer from an all-local Hip Hop/Car show event in Sonoma County, Ca.

as an example of the social interaction component necessary to view Hip Hop as literacy in social

practice through the symbolic flows and meaning-making processes within language and culture. The

fifth 5) is a musical recording of a song entitled “Mi Tiempo” written and recorded by myself and a

bilingual co-artist, as an example of the culmination of music, lyricism, transignification of identity, and

the generative thought and language found in rhymed storytelling. The sixth 6) is a current website with

a video showing a culmination of all of these artifacts’ processes using innovative global language

teaching by international educator Fabien Saucedo (2012a).

Each and all of these artifacts offer the challenging discussion of how to synergize a community

language, media tools and literacy, and language as a social practice into a classroom. Each of these

popular culture artifacts -- intriguingly represents not only the discovery, creation, and learning of

language(s) with these artifacts, but also somewhat parallels the periphery work and challenges that ELL

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students and teachers encounter in the community, on the fringes of the educational mainstream. Many

other artifacts of music, art, literature, film, and print media, offer interesting and cool talking points for

the philosophical analysis of education through popular culture, subculture, (and arguably not-so-

popular sub-culture) lenses. I chose these artifacts because they represent the beginnings of what I

would wish to have my students create as part of their culminating project for English learning and

critical media. They also help to explain the academic use of Hip Hop as a conduit for language, a

cultural medium, and a resource for knowledge, and offer critical cornerstones and trajectory for

discussions about the lives and practices of local and global multilingual language learners and

importance and necessity of including their identities in language learning.

The main curriculum theorist explored as the center link previously noted is Alastair Pennycook

(1990, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2007d, 2007e). His transgressive educational theory of language learning is

explored with lacings of postmodern reconceptualist Patrick Slattery, (2006a, 2006b), Neo-Marxist Jane

Anyon (1980), and transgressive theorist Bell Hooks (2006; cited in Pennycook, 2007a). Reconceptual

and transgressive ideas in pedagogy are briefly explored against traditional idealists, perrenialists and

essentialists, Franklin Bobbitt (2009), Elliot Eisner (2009), E.D. Hirsch (1987), Popham, (2009), and Tyler

(2009). Discussions and analysis surrounding reasoning, both for and against the synergy of Hip Hop and

ESL theory and praxis as an extension of democracy, are present via Feinberg & Soltis (1985), Giroux

(2004), Horton (1990), and Anyon (1980). Particular attention is given towards John Dewey’s (2009)

progressivism, as it sits more comfortably within our current rifts of the educational paradigm.

I chose Pennycook’s transgressive theory to note its movement that paces itself beyond the

postmodern, in part, to argue that curriculum theory is evolving at a pace slower than the needs of

teachers and students who may look to teach, and learn, in a non-traditional manner. Pennycook’s

transgressive theory is not only cutting edge, it is one impetus calling for a paradigm shift to move

beyond the postmodern arguments situated in polemic, leftist, and some of bi-partisanship surrounding

much curriculum theory, while also arguing that such dichotomous polarities are unnecessary within

sociolinguistics and global language teaching and learning (Pennycook, 2007a). In doing so, language

posits itself at the intimately local levels where teachers and language learners are participating within a

culture of transnational and transcultural flow locally, and around the world. His ethnographic and

empirical research stems from his extensive work both within and outside of America, and along with

Saucedo (2011, 2012a, 2012b), is offering a fresh perspective to theory and praxis (Pennycook, 1990,

2007a-2007e).

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Holistic Questions about Hip Hop Pedagogy and Education

American familiarity with Hip Hop is not enough to frame understanding the following points,

and, neither is an in-depth discussion about any necessity of identifying with people of color, or with Hip

Hop culture. Hip Hop culture is existential as a whole. Hip Hop is not only a Black American music or art

form, with linguistic implications for a global imperialist indoctrination of only American, or African

American, -- English language, but instead is “engaging much more broadly with a cultural movement

with various inflections across the globe” (Pennycook, 2007a, p. 150). Hip Hop transgressive pedagogy

[deconstructs] “colonial imperialist paradigms”, where Black identities are represented ‘one-

dimensionally’. Hip Hop culture is seen as a transgressive art; a challenge to norms of language, identity,

and ownership” (Hooks, 1994, p. 98, as quoted by Pennycook, 2007a, p. 148). It is an “aesthetic

autonomy and artistic purity, [with] an emphasis on the localized and temporal rather than the

putatively universal and eternal” Shusterman (2000, p. 61) as quoted by Pennycook, (2007a, p. 148).

Students permeating geopolitical and regional boundaries in almost all realms of public life individualize

Hip Hop offering a perspective of it as part of holistic education. Localized and localizing language then

hits home with ESL/EFL instructors when we consider curriculum with this point in mind.

It has been said “Hip Hop is a universal language” (Pennycook, 2007e). If this is so, why did it

start in the United States, in a pre-dominantly English speaking country, when its roots are Afro-

Caribbean and Indigenous and Urban, - respectively? What does it mean to be a universal language?

What characteristics are necessary for this worldliness? Can non-native speakers learn English through

one of the newest studied forms in applied linguistics and academe; while it is simultaneously, the most

widely accepted and appropriated cultural forms and languages internationally? What curriculum theory

and theorists would support the implementation of English taught and learned through Hip Hop culture

and its elements? What roles and interactions are necessary with the teacher or student for the best

practices? How do theory and practice intersect if neither the teacher nor the student is familiar with

Hip Hop? Where do TESOL, Hip Hop pedagogy, and Second Language Acquisition theory intersect to

answer these questions? Excellent questions, yet, they are not to be fully answered in this report,

however, explorations should elicit further clues and questions surrounding most of them.

Transgressive theorist Pennycook (2007a) moved from a focus on content to a focus on form

and function, by concluding, “Hip-hop both produces and is produced by a cultural context that often

thinks differently about questions of language, writing, identity, and ownership from the mainstream

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discourses of the academy” (p. 150). He argued for allowing the flows by which hip-hop language(s)

have traveled among rappers to “open up new ways of thinking about education” (p. 154) called hip-hop

pedagogies. More specifically, he argued, “the verbal performance of rap”, such as the conscious mixing

of linguistic traditions and styles, “blurs the distinction between literate and oral modes of

communication’…presenting a tool for [the explicit engagement and development] of language and

language awareness”, Auzanneau (2002), as quoted by (Pennycook, 2007a, p. 147). The previously

proposed questions need exploring in order to justify such work at any place or educational level,

especially if we pay attention to the fact that post-secondary research is growing alongside K-12 (Diaz,

Fergus, & Noguera, 2010-2011; Petchauer, 2010; Rice, 2003; Rodriguez, 2009). Yet, arguments placing it

between or among any of the essentialist and perrenialists paradigms seek to define Hip Hop very

narrowly, within a form of urban poetry, and only within certain disciplines (Kinloch, 2005; Petchauer,

2009; Sarkar & Winer, 2006). Naturally, there are also broader arguments surrounding Hip Hop in the

transgressive paradigm, as Bell Hooks (2006) argues against one part of Pennycook’s (2007e) notion of

localized authenticity, and claims that Hip Hop language cannot be authenticated as an indigenous

practice because of its mobility and contextualized placement in an imperialist global society. Can it be

authenticated then in the area of anthropological studies described by Bruner (2009)? If so, then it has a

place in second language acquisition, TESOL, and anthropology (Mitchell & Myles, 2001; Bruner, 2009).

Crucial for understanding Hip Hop at the linguistic level, is that within its own linguists, are evolving in

both the scholarly literature, and within its communal practice (Sarkar & Winer, 2006). Even different

spellings carry different connotations. For example, Hiphop – (no hyphen and no capitalization of the

noun) is the name of our creative force in the World. It is our lifestyle and collective consciousness. Hip

Hop (no hyphen, both capitalized acting as a noun and an adjective) is the name of our culture and

artistic elements, [as in Hip Hop - language]. hip-hop (no capitalization, and either acting as a noun or

verb [i.e. ‘rapping’]) is Rap music product and its mainstream activities (Reeken, 2009).

Strengths, weaknesses, and arguments surrounding Hip Hop as empiricism

Diaz, Fergus, & Noguera’s (2010-2011) report a national online census of one hundred and fifty-

nine organizations, projects, and schools offering some sort of Hip-Hop Education courses or programs

as they relate to the current developmental state of the Hip-Hop Education field. Their report supports

Deweyan progressivism in that they describe hip-hop as a permeable art form that reflects and

reinterprets the world around it; it incorporates legacies and the next thing on the horizon—and in a

subversion of conventional appropriations of English, creates a space for democratic participation (Diaz

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et al., 2010-2011). Hip Hop is existential, so it is arguably malleable and adaptable empirically, yet this

report does not nearly substantiate enough empirical evidence so far. This New York University study

also provides policy and programmatic recommendations supporting Hip Hop as integral part of

academic disciplines, with close interdisciplinary kinships to the Arts, Music education, technology

integration, and entrepreneurship. Massachusetts Institute for Technology, one of the main hubs for

second language acquisition and research in English and Foreign languages and literatures, was a survey

participant. More notably, Diaz et al. (2010-2011) reported activities that demonstrated connections to

common core learning standards, and the number one most frequently cited skill-building activities used

with the elements of Hip-Hop was English Language Arts.

Petchauer’s (2009) review of the ethnographic approach of (Morrell and Duncan-Andrade, 2002;

Morrell, 2004) the curricular unit has students “make meaningful connections between the rap texts and

Romantic and Elizabethan poetry as well as make connections between the poems and the larger social

contexts” (p. 953). Moreover, “Rap is important not only as a tool for engaging students’ interests, but

also ‘as a site of knowledge about contemporary currents in poetry”, (Pennycook, 2007a, p. 147), and

this connects the contemporary to the classics. Micro-inflections that ethnographic research offers are

equally important for Hip Hop and ESL pedagogy as the macro-quantitative data described by Diaz et al.

(2010-2011), as they offer intimate reflections for the teacher and learner in contexts that detail

nuances explored therein. Large survey based studies are impressive in their own right also, but are

limited in the field. Petchauer (2009) critiques studies “typically more concerned with what seems to

work rather than how it works, why it works, or what may be some of the unintended implications”, and

he continues noting, “there is a tendency in such studies as these for success or improved academic

achievement to be conflated with academic engagement or ambiguous altogether”, (p. 954).

Considering Diaz, Fergus & Noguera’s (2010-2011) study takes place in the geographical heartland of Hip

Hop culture, (New York City, U.S.A.) has important implications for curriculum built in Northern

California, as the localized practices, and cultural and linguistic traditions may be very different, and

require different maneuvers of teacher constructivism, community interactions, different

sociolinguistics, and designs for discursiveness in building curriculum.

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Arguments surrounding the framing of Hip Hop as empirical research are complex. As Petchauer

(2009) notes, a strong empirical limitation is because production of scholarly works is very separate from

the lived experiences of people who identify with and create hip-hop. Scholarly works are separate

when they focus on products such as rap songs more than the groups, processes, and contexts that

create them. He continues noting that studies such as these often “lack empirical substantiation that

these texts contain the same meanings in the hermeneutical estimation of actors in local spaces” (p.

950). Petchauer (2009) offers a framework for viewing Hip Hop research in three ways: A)

historical/textual (i.e. based out of cultural studies, communicative practices, and socio-historical

lenses), and B) social commentary, which is generated outside of academe for broader audiences [(i.e.

“Shoptalk” discussed by Majors et al. (2009)]. Petchauer argues against social commentary (Majors et

al., 2009), as being empirically unsound, but holds there are three strands of scholarly work relevant and

empirically sound for education: 1) Hip Hop Education (as text to text), and 2) Hip Hop – meanings and

identities (as text to self). C) Grounded studies (which includes ethnographic research), and 3) Hip Hop

aesthetics (from one self/to another self/to the world).

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Connecting to transgressive theory, Petchauer (2009) and Pennycook (2007a) both agree how

questionable practices of only using rap lyrics or pop-culture as a “hook” or “gimmick” to “lure

[students] into learning, without any reflexive or serious engagement with them”, has a profound effect

on how Hip Hop is perceived empirically (Petchauer, 2009, p. 953; Pennycook, 2007a, p. 83). This type of

malpractice is dismissive of the development of identities, desires, and the complexity of pop culture,

and it is more dismissive of popular music’s history as a form of political protest. Perhaps because now

society’s contemporary concept of “popular music” has changed, and how much “popular music” has

changed aesthetically, its own definition is now differentially discernible as only “pop music” today, and

is perhaps part of the reason why Hip Hop, as a subculture of “popular music” (and not “pop”), is much

less accessible worldwide. Thus, this pits the desirable course of using Hip Hop slang, vernacular, and

varieties of global Englishes, with locally more complex multilingual Englishes. Sarkar and Winer (2006)

contextualize Pennycook’s (2007a) notion of converging globalization and localization through the

multilingual lyricists’ use of both, and this is where the fifth artifact is justifiable. “The local language is

combined with a global sound; that is, the performers demonstrate their links with a global culture

outside the local context, while simultaneously serving to ground the increasingly internationally

recognised rai phenomenon in local, Arabic-speaking Algerian culture, even as rai moves away from its

geographical place of origin” (p. 188). For example, English represented by Nigerian author Chinua

Achebe, maintains its Nigerian culture, not the ‘high culture” activities of English language writers

(Pennycook, 2003). American artists like the Last Poets, Sam Cooke, John Lennon, Patti Smith, Gil Scott-

Heron, Bob Dylan, and other forms of protest music of the 1960’s were once considered popular culture

music, suggesting a subversion of pop music into the now folk genre, where many place Hip Hop music

and all of its movements within. Contemporary political artists such as KRS-One, Grandmaster Flash,

N.W.A., Talib Kweli, Calle 13, The Roots, Public Enemy, Dead Prez, The Coup, Rage against the Machine,

and Immortal Technique do not hold majority attention in contemporary media and education. They

face the nullification of being labeled radical or leftist conscious objectors, or diminishment by their

demonization of majority historicity, ridicule as urban mythology, and therefore must seek exposure

through alternative media against media control by conservative rightists. This is where the dominion of

a politicized educational paradigm becomes so problematic, when these artists are censored from what

Dewey would call a necessary conversation inclusive of all voices in democratic fashion. This does not

involve appropriating undesirable values, but deconstructing them from desirable values in education

through critical inquiry, and it has been empirically proven that one does not have to be a person of

color to invoke and use African American “Black” Vernacular English (AAVE), (Pennycook, 2003;

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Sweetland, 2002) to do so. Sarkar and Winer (2006) point out that “The expansion of international

communication and global media seems to be making it easier for a group to assert their own, local

identity and at the same time offer a universal message to the rest of the planet”, (p. 188). As much as

we all grew up loving particular music, we will not stick to only one particular song or only one artist,

one ethnic group or even categorize our music by race, yet, we resist those forms of music and

communication we are most uncomfortable in understanding to educate ourselves, why?

Unquestionable is the fact that Hip Hop’s language diffusion is growing complex internationally and is

being studied excessively outside of its original home nation (Pennycook, 2007a; Sarkar and Winer,

2006).

The assumption that the McCarthy Trials, the Warren Court decisions, the civil rights

movements, the civil rights act of 1964, the feminist movement, the million man march, the riots in Los

Angeles, California in 1965 and 1992, and the American Indian Sovereignty movement of the 1970’s -- all

never had a place in American democratization, is equivalent to assuming Hip Hop, (which was has

strong ties born from these events) -- is not a valuable piece of this democratization. Such an

assumption is grossly fallacious. The goals of Hip Hop education and ESL education are similar, because

they set us as educators out to question ourselves as to how we will retain the multicultural struggle

grounded in the history of minority people of color seeking equality and equity through the control over

their education and learning of language. This is where the second artifact is most pertinent. Tupac

Shakur’s book takes us through his life as young man born from a Black Panther nationalist stripped of

her political connections, to his days as a student at an all-American school for the arts, to him as an

educated, strong actor and respected poet, to a black man seduced by capitalist corruption and rogue

police criminality. Identity, and Language that are both political, just as they are economical,

educational, and artful, and that values such identity, cherishes creativity, can all be useful to cultivate

academic literacy. Through the expression, communication, and use of the Englishes from whence our

multicultural roots sprout, and for students who may not learn in traditional curriculum, or school

settings, or whom may offer their own tales from their homelands wrapped in strive or controversy, it

offers various forms and functions to learn in our shared nation.

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Since its inception, Hip Hop as a culture has been struggling against being co-opted by large

corporate conglomerate media (Saucedo, 2011). It has documented principles and a physical and cyber

declaration of peace (translatable in six languages), and a cultural knowledge base of scholars, teachers,

activists, professionals, and citizens that originated from a pilgrimage of its founder Afrika Bambaataa in

1973, (Hip Hop, 2010). However multicultural all of the actual members of its community are, its online

website is arguably ethnocentric (Zulu Nation, 2012). L1 learners and Non-native speakers (NNS)

struggle between acculturating the English language while sustaining cultural and linguistic heritages of

their native language, and against assimilating these and losing their cultural and linguistic heritages in

segments of society and public school that obliterate these individual heritages based on cultural deficit

perspective (Valenzuela, 2009; Rodriguez, 2009). Just as Hip Hoppers seek to preserve their culture, this

struggle between acculturation and assimilation relates to the current state of education that is a

rationalist, standards-based one, and where NCLB is narrowly tailored based on legislation and not on

student heritage, language, or individualism in learning styles.

Redefining Literacy within empiricism

Deconstruction, of the process of excluding certain populations of students in the critical

curricular paradigm is sound, (Giroux, 2004). Deconstruction of the identities, cultures and languages

these students communicate with, is a trademark of both the postmodern and the transgressive

paradigm as well, yet is becomes a form of constant reconstruction or transgression. Deconstructive

postmodernism (Slattery, 2006a, 2006b) is applicable within critical media literacy and critical pedagogy

to deconstruct how and why mainstream conglomerate media has censored and limited the

educational, knowledge seeking, and transconsciousness of Hip Hop culture, music, and its semiotic

language. “Hip Hop’s pioneers organically developed the elements to deal with the socio-geo-political

circumstances of their communities. Unfortunately, by the late 1990’s, Hip Hop had superficially become

synonymous with Gangster culture…what we’re talking about is the intersection of Art and Commerce”,

(Saucedo, 2011). Literacies were redefined and expanded by the new media literacy school (Gee, 2003;

Kellner, 2003; Lewis & Jhally, 1998) and the postmodern: “To be literate today, for example, is different

from being literate in the days of Charlemagne…or in colonial America… [and] visual literacy [is] required

by present day media” (Noddings, 2009, p. 426). As an extra criterion, an interview was conducted, with

Fabien “Farbeon” Saucedo (2011, 2012a, 2012b), who is a Hip Hop emcee, practitioner, and scholar with

a Master of Arts from New York University currently teaching Hip Hop and language in Hell’s Kitchen

(Bronx, New York) for the Hip Hop Re:Education Project. Saucedo (2012b) speaks in terms of his teaching

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English as language development, taught intrinsically in the most part, coming from his background as

an English teacher. He holds there is a hierarchy of literacy in the school systems as related as the

[top/down] of literacy that Kellner (2003) and Alvermann (2004) discuss that is detrimental to ESL/EFL

teaching progressivism. He also holds this true concerning the notion of educational standards as well,

and that many institutions hold a cultural deficit perspective (Valenzuela, 2009) upon groups of

students, and there needs to be larger more formalized discussion of this versus the cultural asset

[capital] view of literacy (Rodriguez, 2009; Yosso, 2005). Saucedo (2012b) maintains that Hip Hop is a

“multi-elemental” culture and invokes a symbolic use of the artistic to transmit messages that he feels,

is, and always should, be validating learner’s language systems they use every day.

Literacy has traditionally been viewed in academic settings (schools) as an isolated activity

consisting of a discrete set of skills. “Literacy is being redefined as a multifaceted and complex social

activity that occurs across a variety of contexts, [and]…not just skills in reading and writing but the ability

to utilize those skills across a variety of text- and non-text-based situations to communicate with others”

(Majors, Kim, & Ansari, 2009, p. 345). Meaning thus can be constructed across media and across

individuals, however it is not enough to just talk about developing literacy as useable knowledge, it

must be produced and assessed, which relies on one’s ability to access, interpret, critique, and produce

texts, both oral and written, on both paper and electronic media (Gee 2003; Kellner 2001; Majors et al.,

2009). Internationally, Hip Hop has continued to be a media text and source for English language

learning ever since it first hit American airwaves, “recording Yo! MTV Raps is how they learned English”,

(Vinyl Archaeologist, 2012). Thus, as mentioned by “Farbeon” Saucedo (2012b), Hip Hop creates

opportunities for the creation and facilitation of dialogue through multi-literacies that analyze and

validate sources and flux of language use, language awareness, and language development.

All of these Hip Hop elements can constitute literacy as both a social and individual practice

(Kelly, 2012). Pennycook (2007a) also mentions this collective conception of adaptability, localization

and (re)creation of Hip Hop as a literacy practice, just as Richardson (2006), (Chang, 2006; Mitchell,

2001) also do - cited in Petchauer (2009, p. 960). Hip Hop is a subculture of American life inflated by

media conglomerates and circles in the music industry, which only focus on, expose, and exploit, the

most materialistic and misogynist of only one of its elements -- Rap music. This element of exploitation

is constantly debated within Hip Hop scholarship in and outside of academe. The censorship thus

created, is a stage in the Hip Hop community that is a constant nexus for critical debate surrounding the

legitimate artistic and aesthetic value, versus the commoditization of its elements of Rap music and

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fashion. Critical media literacy is a modern field that offers trajectory for studying Hip Hop and ESL

literacy in this fashion. Critical media literacy and cultural studies theorist Kellner (2001) offers empirical

support to involve students in analyzing video, audio, and imagery as texts and where student and

teachers become conduits to connect the traditionalist notion of the classic canon to the perennialists’

notion of contemporary works in use. Remixes are ever-growing popular culture examples where

students can integrate classic works of art, music, or imagery of any sort, with contemporary art, music,

or imagery to form videos, pictures, and/or augment photographs, (Lewis & Jhally, 1998; Parker, 2011;

Center, 2005) and thus, connecting these integrations for student-formed aesthetic language projects

proven to work in the classroom (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002). Also notably supported in

postmodern applied linguistics Wei (2011), Remixes are very popular among youth internationally who

utilize social networking, because that is where globally, culturally, and linguistically diversified Hip Hop

has resurfaced.

Modalities in literacy

Hip Hop culture has five base forms (i.e. domains or elements) of literacy, each with several

layers of modality, (Pennycook, 2007a, p. 48). MC’ing is the lyrical in its performative and linguistic

elements. D.J.’ing has its musical instrumental and metronomic elements, cognitive tools, linear mind

mapping, and the descriptive potency through digital and analogue sampling and mixing (Pennycook,

2007f) that parallel the invention strategy of having English learners create stories using wordless

picture books (Kim, 2012). Graffiti art embodies visual and semiotic languages, characterizations,

decoding of identity, and aesthetic spaces and hybridity found in most arts-based curriculum

(Pennycook, 2007a, 2007f; Spina, 2006). B-Boy/Girl (Break dancing) offers symbolic representation in

each physical move or step, with a sociocultural dimension of interaction and body language as a

semiotic literacy in social practice (Lantolf, 2000; Kelly, 2012), with the potential for using Total Body

Response (TPR) teaching in ESL (Asher, 1966). The fifth element of Hip Hop culture is knowledge, which

is also consistent with ‘knowledge-of-self’ and Paulo Freire’s ‘consciousness’, (Noguera, 2007; Akom,

2009; Reeken, 2009). Majors et al. (2009) note their cultural-context-based perspective of literacy

“requires an individual’s awareness of either his or her own understandings and interpretations of the

world and those of others. Within this fifth element, literacy skills are used to create, think, and re-think

adolescent worlds. This perspective shifts the focus away from the functional aspects of literacy, derived

from most definitions, and enables us to consider how literacy, language, and culture are intimately,

connected” (p. 345). Skills are important no less, but the mantra that “it’s all about skills”, in any

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element of Hip Hop, is never void of the fifth element, knowledge. Consistent with ESL pedagogy’s focus

on language function through communicative language teaching technique (CLT) (Savignon, 1991, 2001),

this places the form of language (verb tense, plurality, and spelling) as secondary, or equally leveraged.

Modes of thinking and reasoning parallel genre/discourse analysis in L2 writing pedagogy and lend

themselves to specialized ways of thinking and reasoning (Vollmer, 2012). Modes of thinking and

reasoning, and genre analysis both trump any solitary reliance on teaching remote functional skills, to

instead infuse dialoguing within text production in generative, invention, cubing, and pre-writing

strategies that students tap from their own psyche’s language ecology, (Johns et al., 2006; Kramsch in

Lantolf, 2000; Majors et al., 2009; Vollmer, 2012;).

Even if students are not personally skilled in these Hip Hop elements, they can be contextualized

and to teach language and content in CLT (Savignon, 1991, 2001). Still, assessment of CLT can be

reportedly frustrating to teachers, depending on their preparation and experience. Some feel frustrated

at the seeming ambiguity in discussions of communicative ability among students differing in language

level and ability, although the negotiation of meaning may be a lofty goal, and this view lacks precision

and does not provide a universal scale for assessment of individual learners (Savignon, 2001). Language

ability is variable and highly dependent upon context and purpose as well as on the roles and attitudes

of all involved, however, communicative language teaching continues its ascent in most fields within

TESOL (Savignon, 2001).

Therefore, providing second language arts students with opportunities to “unpack both

processes and practices in reading and writing texts…[so] that they may participate in the problem

solving and decision making of their community and world” (Majors et al., 2009, p. 344) is sound.

Traditionalist Popham (2009) would support the co-creation and use of rubrics, project-based

group work, problem-solving tasks, performances, and portfolio-based presentations as both formative

and summative tools of assessment for CLT because constructed responses call for rubrics, and clear

writing prompts. Saucedo (2012a, 2012b) uses both video and performance based portfolios in his

assessments. All of these assessment tools should, in the least, hold the potential to be discursively

produced with the students. The existentialist curricular paradigm, housed by Paulo Freire, Myles

Horton, Maxine Greene, and Nell Noddings, offer blueprints for framing the emancipatory and

liberationist pedagogy. “The skills and tools associated with literary-based problem-solving tasks are not

just bound to one site, but are meditational tools that correspond across contexts, continuing to affect

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discourse practices and individual development” (Majors et al., 2009, p. 349). Saucedo (2012b) spoke of

how he and his young people both experience shock and humbleness, through their immersion of task-

based language activities by just traveling from the Bronx, NY to Berlin, Germany and throughout Europe

(Saucedo, 2012a). He brings this notion back to Hip Hop with his student’s ‘navigating the cipher’

(‘ciphering’ is the linguistic meditational communication practiced in any element in Hip Hop – namely

rapping, poetry and talking). Using performance and song-writing, he has his students and emcees from

Berlin, U.S. and Europe, set the cipher stage in mostly English, but when breaking them into small

groups, in their conversations and “ciphering” lyrically, they negotiate meanings and lyrics to build the

song. This is where explicit instruction could be taught for any target language component. In his case,

translation, vocabulary acquisition, and pronunciation are most important, because when getting them

in the [sound recording] booth, no matter their native language, or English proficiency, we leave it up to

them [implying total student autonomy in producing cohesive language].

Remixes extend into the transgressive paradigm according to Pennycook (2007a),

“Transmodality is language use in terms of mixed modes of semiotic diffusion…implying that

reconfiguring occurs across [modes as defined by Kress (2003)] and that these modes are also

integrated” (p. 49) in Remixes. Gee (2003) aims at crossing boundaries of aesthetics pointing to the need

to account for how the previous expression of others is recontextualized, and suggesting that

contemporary acts of digital sampling in Hip Hop music can also be seen in relation to a parallel

philosophy of creativity in language, and parallels invention strategies in L2 creative writing (Vollmer,

2012). Shifman’s (2012) notes how the Meme a video version of remix wording and visual semiotics --

has become an emblem of participatory culture, a concept as an analytic tool, and popular media that

generate extensive user engagement by way of creative derivatives and thereby invoking further

creative dialogue.

Past the Postmodern: Transgressive Theory

It makes sense that when we are redefining literacies, and using these literacies everyday, that

we are (re)directing curricular theory to fasten it and pace it to postmodern elements of language and

literacy. There are four transgressive subparts to Pennycook’s (2007a) theory within the relationship of

language and Hip Hop, all of which move beyond both dichotomies of the global and local use of the

English language (Pennycook, 2007a). Understanding the transgressive theory and paradigm requires

understanding other subparts put forth by Pennycook (2007a). Transculturation is the “constant

15


processes of borrowing, bending, and blending of cultures, and point to ways in which those apparently

on the receiving end of cultural and linguistic domination select, appropriate, refashion and return new

cultural and linguistic forms through complex interactive cultural groups, [often] with sub cultural

affiliations of gender, class, sexual orientation, profession, interest, desires and so on”, (Pennycook,

2007a, p. 47). The rhythm of poetry, mind, and language, are not instinctually separate as those formed

by people who form them within their social silos. Pennycook (2007a) continues by noting on pedagogy,

“in the context of hip-hop, and in particular rap, it would be a mistake to try to read the lyrics without an

appreciation of the music” (p. 48). Whereas the ethos and the logos are less separable then from their

definitions in the Standard English canon, music and rap are both interdependent elemental guides of

the natural course of events, existing beyond the temporal world that they order. Intertwining written

and orally improvised lyrics, with musical elements becomes a socially mediated literacy of interaction.

Note then, here is where “rap” parts ways with “spoken word” or “slam poetry”.

Advisably, previously noted artifacts have been referenced to improve the explanation of

transgressive subparts. Transculturation may be seen through transidiomatic practices: “the

communicative practices of transnational groups that interact using different languages and

communicative codes simultaneously present in a range of communicative channels, both local and

distant…and electronic media, in contexts heavily structured by social indexicalities and semiotic codes”,

(Pennycook, 2007a, p. 47). Transidiomatic practices can metaphorically be represented with person (or

any text) as a “living open book”. To use the second artifact noted earlier, the book of narrative text

Tupac Resurrection [although in English] provides both pictures and language, and is usable as a memoir

and narrative for the discussion of the discursive process of life, and death. To then have students

writing autobiographies, letters to their past, present, and future selves (or kin/friends), etc. [In any

language], is when the word (through writing or orality) can transcend these boundaries. Transidiomatic

practice is taking place through person orators, who either embody themselves or others, use any

chosen language, and through a discursive process of language, make, and mediate -- meaning with

another person or text. The use of the prefix “trans” is to transcend the bounded norms of social and

cultural dictates, but also to question the ontologies on which definitions of [language, culture, and

identity] rest” as Pennycook (2007a) proposes a form of “transgressive theory that seeks both to

account for the transgressions of hip-hop and to disrupt some standard ontologies”, (p. 36). Even the

prior example is never the end-all of possibilities of language with transgressive theory or ontology.

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Transmodality is the second subpart of Pennycook’s (2007a) transgressive theory, and it implies

that meaning occurs in multimodalities – (based on semiotic theory) – but that language cannot be

understood in isolation. It also draws upon Geosemiotics, (Scollon and Scollon, 2003; cited in

Pennycook, 2007a) emphasizing ‘indexicality, action, and identity are all anchored in the physical spaces

and real times of our material world’, (p. 50). It also stems from somatic musical and spatial theories so

that the embodiment, flow, and location of meaning may be understood in the complexity of their

relations. Kramsch & Whiteside (2001) simplify it somewhat more as ‘symbolic competence’ as a “late

modern way of conceiving of both communicative and intercultural competence in multilingual settings”

as a ‘mindset’ that can create “relationships of possibility” if the individual can see their “embodied

selves, history and subjectivity, through the history and subjectivity of others” (p. 313). Remembering

that all of Pennycook’s (2007a) “trans” theories and components imply constant movement through or

between their parts, or the learner’s realities. Thus, this implies that learner’s identities, cultures, and L1

and L2’s are never static. Transmodality relates to notions of performativity as transgressive meaning-

making -- (e.g. writing on the walls of the city, mixing languages, sampling sound texts, walking the walk,

wearing the clothes) – that becomes a performative making of meaning across many sites” (Pennycook,

2007a, p. 50; Pennycook, 2007f). This performativity drives language use and interaction as a socially

mediated process of meaning making in Hip Hop practices. The fourth artifact of the Hip Hop show flyer

is representative of this inter/intrapersonal practice. In relation to Vygotskyan sociocultural methods,

the attention is focused on how the learner ‘sees’, ‘places’, or ‘vocalizes’ oneself, how one ‘sees’,

‘places’, or ‘vocalizes’ oneself amongst various inanimate objects, among other people unfamiliar to

oneself, or when donning inanimate objects such as clothing, or certain totems and craftwork, before,

during, and even after using language.

Transtextuality and Transignification are the third and fourth subparts that apply equally to

signs as semiotic forms of language. Understandings of Vygotskyan (1986) and Bakhtinian (1986)

language and thought, view “semiotics as carrying traces of meaning over time, located in particular

contexts, open to interpretation and dialogical, transtextuality refers to a form of social semiotics that

may deal with anything from a single sign to an extended text”, (p. 53). Signs are texts that need to be

understood productively, contextually, and discursively; (i.e. they have histories, they are contextually

influenced, and they occur within frameworks of meaning), such as: 1) Pretextual history of the sign –

(gives a context for its iconic status. 2) Contextual relations – (in which its use occurs [physical location,

the participants, the indexical pointing to the world]). 3) Subtextual meanings – (i.e. discourses and

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ideologies that mobilize, and are mobilized, by the sign). 4) Intertextual echoes – (by which the signs and

texts refer to each other [meaning occurring across texts]). 5) Posttextual interpretations – (of the actors

[the meanings participants read into the sign]). The social semiotics of transsignification holds that none

of the above exist in isolation from each other, because the meaning of any sign points back to its prior

posttextual uses (both individually and socially), and is embedded contextually (to ask where is the sign?

Who utters it? Referring to what?), is bound up with larger frames of subtextual meaning (to ask what

wider patterns of meaning is the sign used?), connects intertextually to other uses (to ask where are its

other textual contexts?), and is always open to posttextual interpretation (Pennycook, 2007a, p. 54). The

fifth artifact (Bilingual Hip Hop song recording) and the sixth artifact (the ‘cyber cipher’ embedded video

by Saucedo (2012a), are probably the best examples of this as both a process and a product of language

development, and notably, the sixth artifact also involves the next subpart, -- translation.

Pennycook’s (2007a) fifth subpart notes, “Translation is not so much a process of encoding and

decoding across languages but of making meaning across and against codifications”, (p. 55). Amidst the

obscure relationship held in the “difference” between words, concepts, or ideas, “knowledge works as

translation and translation works as knowledge, as trans- rather than interdisciplinary, in undermining

disciplinary foundations of knowledge” (p. 55). So, when speaking of Hip Hop or language in the

transgressive, we “always have to be aware that ‘translation terms’ (i.e. words like travel, culture,

peasant, style, word, talk, etc.) -- open up questions of difference” as concepts whose meanings may not

be similar across and within languages, and may conceal levels of difference that need to be opened up”

(p. 55). Here is where Freirian critical pedagogy can serve to elicit codes through visual de-coding in the

classroom (Noguera, 2007). However, decoding involves more than only lexical, phonological,

morphological, and semantic elements of language, it requires intercultural communication and cross-

lingual discourse through communicative language teaching and learning. That ‘knowledge working as

translation (and vice versa)’ can be found in the process between which one monolingual or non-English

speaker, and another bilingual vocalist exchange ideas, words, and collaboratively build language to

finish song production.

Controversy and complexity with second language acquisition theory and transgressive Hip Hop

Interlanguage, code switching, and juxtaposition between a learner’s first language (L1) and

their second (i.e. target) language (L2) of English have both positive and negative effects on their

capacity in language learning – depending on the learner. Overgeneralization can disrupt a healthy

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transfer between the L1 and L2, and the variability of certain grammatical, phonological, and

morphological elements of English are learned at different paces, often not through a linear systematic,

depending in the learner (Mitchell & Myles, 2001). Fossilization and learning plateaus, as well as

backsliding can occur, as the developmental order of L2 acquisition parallels the development of L1

acquisition, but does not consist of sudden jumps, but of the gradual reordering of earlier rules in favor

of later ones (Vollmer, 2012). Further descriptions of these linguistic components aside, they offer a

challenging complexity to teaching ESL when using Hip Hop vernacular, euphemisms, and idiomatic

expressions, especially for adolescents who may still be developing linguistically. The question remains,

when do we elicit distinct language components from composed or oral speech, and teach explicit forms

or functions, and when do we front load target forms or functions of English language components and

have students build language aiming to create those target forms and functions? Should we do both,

and if so, when? When we use communicative techniques we are basing language learning on more

implicit practices, yet we still have to address grammar in context, if that is the target objective.

Proposed here is that urban and multilingual students can increase fluency and literacy through these

complexities when constructivist teaching approaches facilitate collaborative language tasks such as

songwriting, poetry, video composing, and the vast amount of options for exploring texts and language

found in transgressive components described by Pennycook (2007a). To elicit student’s use of their

native language in transgressive manner is to call for the exchange of conventional native language, but

also to have those forming transliterations as described by Pennycook (2003). Literacy as a social

practice asks for dynamic interactions between two or more language learners of different language

levels to build and negotiate meaning towards through using the target language. Translation and

collaborative dictation are examples of sociocultural teaching approaches to place and push students to

learn language interactively through zones of proximal development (Lantolf, 2000, p.211). Saucedo

(2012b) notes, “Hip Hop aesthetics is (are) a remix aesthetic, which makes it a powerful tool when

authentically validating and integrating the use of their first language [L1], by encouraging students to

remix it, appropriation then is most appropriate for affirming to remix these languages [L1 & L2) and

make it ‘new’. Like those “glocal” transliterations exemplified by Saucedo (2011), and described by

Pennycook (2003, p. 526), we can see new “Japaneses” and “Englishes” being formed through the

remixing of them, thus, creating new lexical and syntactical complexities.

Of the aforementioned language components, some are empirically, yet controversially, --

supported in the evolution of second language acquisition research. For example, focusing on the use of

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cognitive versus the social theorem in second language acquisition, Larsen-Freeman (2007) note, “[Firth

and Wagner, 1997] urged SLA researchers to reconsider unquestioningly accepted and well-established

concepts such as nonnative speaker (NNS), learner, and interlanguage. As Firth and Wagner stated in

their 1998 response to the commentators, “we are unable to accept the premises of ‘interlanguage’—

namely, that language learning is a transitional process that has a distinct and visible end”, (p. 91),

(Larsen-Freeman, 2007, p. 776). This transitional process is substantiated in Second Language

Acquisition research (VanPatten & Williams, 2007), and is exactly what Pennycook (2007a) is attempting

to address, and shift past, through his transcultural flow in transgressive theory of global Englishes.

Sociocultural theory, and critical pedagogy and praxis are often temporally distinct and localized

in research studies. “There are already many studies that show, for instance, how social factors affect

interlanguage use at a single given time…any definition of learning must involve the transcendence of a

particular time and space” (Larsen-Freeman, 2007, p. 783). Transcendence of time is addressed in

transtextuality, transmodality, and transignification, and Pennycook (2007a) describes this

transcendence of space and time in his concepts of fluidity and fixidity (p. 7). Here however, Pennycook

(2007a), like Harklau (1994), is addressing the socialization of language learning over contrasted formal

and informal educational environments: the mainstream (classroom) versus the unconventional (Hip

Hop event/cipher), in which Pennycook deems is where the cultural flow of Englishes occurs within the

transgressive paradigm of English language teaching. Hip Hop Englishes and culture are also embedded

between the contact zones of school and community, just as they mistakenly embedded when studying

texts one dimensionally. This allows English teachers and ELL teachers, from a poetry meeting, a Hip Hop

cipher, or performance, or from a recorded song or video, to elicit target language forms; then to

somehow equivocate non-conventional uses of English with standard uses, in order to build a larger

corpus to expose students to more robust and diverse language, for students to practice with.

Paradigm players’ strengths and weaknesses in critical ESL pedagogy

Sociolinguistics and critical pedagogy work well to extract dialogue involving cultural, identity,

and linguistic politics and hegemonies in education. The pragmatic, existentialist, and Neo-Marxist

theoretical camp hold much weight in the trajectory of Hip Hop and ESL curriculum in this right. The

pragmatist Myles Horton (1990) explicates the process of critical dialogue and reflection expected when

facilitating student and community experiences. ‘They don’t care how much you know, until they know

how much you care’. “Before focusing on what they do in the classroom, we must examine how

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students feel about school, so we can keep them from the “strategy” of psychological withdrawal, of

gradually reducing personal concern and involvement to a point where neither the demand nor one’s

success or failure in coping with it is sharply felt”, (Jackson, 2009, p. 122). Jane Anyon’s (1980) work is

but one cornerstone and catalyst useful in connecting critical to academic literacy that exemplifies how

one can elicit underlying causations of inequity urban and ESL student populations may face when they

are tracked into workforces of which they are unaware. Students who wish to transcend economic

boundaries, by recognizing educational and cultural spaces and positions, then articulating and

comparing them to their community with their classroom demographics can speak, read, write, listen,

and project upon their microcosm of the larger democratic society (Anyon, 1980; Gibbons, 2008; Giroux,

2004; Kellner, 2003; Kelly, 2012).

Kathy Hytten (2006) offers challenges and opportunities of invoking critical pedagogy for social

change, offering a rich discussion to the strengths and weaknesses. One weakness is that a vision of

social justice has never been the dominant one, and this holds true in our current climate where

curriculum has a narrow set of goals, such as raising standardized test scores. Too much focus on testing

that leads to narrowed curricula, and teaching is de-professionalized for test preparation; which

compromises students’ intrinsic motivation to learn and challenge themselves, as they are rewarded for

correct answers, not complex, critical thinking; which diminishes the richness of learning, all of which

are key elements in critical pedagogy and cultural studies. Hytten (2006) reviews three books that invoke

Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Pragmatism, Postmodernism, democratic education, and popular

culture to challenge this diminishment and she argues for a “strategically unified progressive vision of

what education can and should be — one that emerges out of dialogue among and between various

movements and discourses of democratic education and public life”, (p. 224).

Hip Hop and ESL sociolinguistics posits students as practitioners and performers of Englishes

that connect their identities and first language to their second language of English in unique ways. ESL

students are often on the fringes of curricular practice, of standardization, and sometimes, in their

school placement. They are both the creators and refiners of their own identity, localized languages, and

often within both real and imagined communities (Pennycook, 2007a). Imagined communities include

the generated psyches of self (journals, characters, reflections, poems, stories, etc.) to the mass of

selves accessible via cyberspace (avatars, profiles, blogs, video games, social networks, life simulation

sites, etc.) (Gee, 2003). These identities and language within imagined communities provide genres and

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genre analysis in L2 writing and critical media literacy (Johns et al., 2006; Kellner & Share, 2003). They

cross boundaries similarly found in the subfield of multilingual writing and discourse analysis, where

genres are identified and explored cross-textually (John et al., 2006). This crossing over of genres is very

common within Hip Hop music among many music, and within this crossover of boundaries and

languages, comes the blend of speakers, languages, and learners with multi-textual aesthetic (Rollins,

2012).

Crossing over of psychological boundaries for non-native speakers is a staple of critical dialogue.

Disadvantaged, lower-income, urban, and non-native speaking students have been proven to benefit

from critical pedagogy within language learning (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002; Giroux, 2004;

Noguera, 2007; Akom, 2009; Pennycook, 1990), and language learning can result from dialogue between

affluent, middle-class, pre-dominantly Caucasian, native speakers (Noguera, 2007; Akom, 2009;

Rodriguez, 2009). The use of dichotomous language of “oppressed” and “oppressor” is not necessary per

se, neither is the explicit trading of places in the master-slave relationship to describe classes of people

that exist in dialectical opposition to each other. Hip Hop’s subversion into the subterranean

undercurrent of popular culture is profound and can serve in what Slattery (2009) would call a

deconstructive postmodernism. ESL students can already fathom their placement and be asked to

“map” their social arrangements as part of a project as ‘literacy as a social practice’ (Kelly, 2012).

Dialogue is educational in having separate student groups compartmentalize oppression, and by using

language, take action to address forms of oppression, and to rid oppression together as a collaborative

multiplex of language tasks. If such dialogue does not take shape, of if it is not addressed empirically,

then their lies the risk of continuing to serve students into an economic class (Anyon, 1980), jeopardizing

any sense of equity through another form of social stratification (Feinberg & Soltis, 1985).

Another weakness is that there is relatively less empirical evidence on adolescent ESL students

(versus elementary level students) especially outside of mainstream K-12 standard and higher track

(AP/Honors) coursework and classrooms (Forte, Kuti, & O’Day, 2012). Many conservative political

adversaries influencing curriculum in public education, parents, and teachers, with reservations and

misunderstandings of Hip Hop culture and language -- side with many elitists in most canons to view Hip

Hop as “low culture” of language not worthy of study, under a dichotomous top/down: high/low culture

perspective (Alvermann, 2004; Kellner, 2001; Kellner & Share, 2003). In addition, Hip Hop’s new home

for the exposure of its craft and culture to the public became virtual cyberspace. After its last popularity

“boom” in the 1990’s fell to the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Biggie Smalls” Wallace. In

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addition, media and information literacy, cultural studies, and critical media studies are relatively new to

the public mainstream of education (Alvermann, 2004; Kellner & Share, 2005). Therefore, accessing rich

cultural texts of Hip Hop requires access to websites, archives, and communities that are usually blocked

by public school firewalls. One has to look deeply for linguistically complex, and tasteful Hip Hop, as it

regularly does not simply gravitate to teachers from the mainstream media.

The syntactical and linguistic complexity of Americanized Hip Hop, urban, prison, and street

vernacular and language are closely related, which offers a corpus of words as a strength, but also instills

a weakness, or rather, a deeply complex disregard within deeply localized language and distinct cultural

contexts for teaching language, which requires meticulous attention to curricular design. In addition,

cultural contact zones are controversial when involving communities of high-, and at-risk populations,

requiring meticulous design of intercultural communication (Nakayama & Martin, 2003). One strategy

offered was to have students analyze the negotiation of meanings, euphemisms, vernacular, and

language use of the popular HBO show “The Wire” – using subtitling (Home Box Office, 2012). There is

also the strength in exploring vernaculars (including slang, euphemisms, metaphors, and even

nonsensical words) –utilized to generate learning by association of words (student input), appropriation,

and thus allow students to utilize vernacular in summarizing reading material in rhyme scheme forms, in

order to improve reading and coding comprehension. This has been done by the author, in assigning

community college students to summarize their textbook materials in chunked paragraphs of rhyme.

Euphemisms are also more sophisticated forms of communication, often embedded in cultural

understandings, and can offer some difficulty in translations, thus communicative language techniques,

combined with grammar in context pedagogy, are pedagogically ideal.

Alternatives to ideas, other perspectives, & bludgeoning historical roots

Common arguments against my curriculum stem from the essentialist and realists camp of

curriculum theorists Bobbitt (2009), Hirsch (1987), and Tyler (2009), and stem from a monolithic view of

American educational philosophy. Those of whom would most likely ask, ‘who and why should someone

particularize curriculum to integrate across class, ethnic, and educational boundaries that have been

perpetuated in our schools, is this the school’s job’? Tyler (2009) would suggest that necessary

objectives outlined in English and Language arts, are more than knowledge, skills, and habits; they are

modes of thinking, critical interpretation, interests, emotional reactions, etc. However, the Tyler

Rationale would insist that reaching out to ESL students and Hip Hop appropriated youth would require

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tailoring curriculum with agreed upon standards with the committee of ten’s input, (thus requiring

reference from senior-most Hip Hop moguls and scholars). Bobbitt (2009) would require educational

objectives to be scientifically based in their construction. He would suggest they be delineated based on

second language acquisition theory and quantitative data for Hip Hop, which would be highly

problematic as both are in flux and relatively rare. Most notably, however, Bobbitt’s (2009) prioritized

linear list of components for the study and teaching of the English language (pp. 18-19), do not in any

way reflect an accuracy of any known theory of second language acquisition for the elements of English

to be learned in such a sequential or linear manner, (Mitchell & Myles, 2001; VanPatten & Williams,

2007).

Tyler (2009) would agree with the extension of English and Language Arts in Hip Hop through a

subject area curriculum like that by Flocabulary (2012). Tyler would agree with studying learners

themselves as source of educational objectives; however, Hip Hop youth and culture, and second

language speakers and learners cannot learn ample English by only studying how they use it only in their

everyday jobs no matter the immersion of implicit or explicit instruction. He would also agree that the

subject of Hip Hop ESL could contribute to the education of young people who may not choose to be

specialists in English, (Tyler, p. 74) but English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Therefore, teaching

metalanguage (language about language: identifying nouns, verbs, etc.) in TESOL -- remains open but

questionable in this respect, but more fitting then is connecting Hip Hop ESL to academic literacy in this

curriculum (Gordon, 2007). Martusewicz (1997) would agree with the disequilibrium producing these

certain tensions, to provoke intellectual thought about curriculum advances (p. 71). The deconstruction

of Hip Hop, and its reconstruction into literacy as a social practice, would not be supported well in the

idealist camp. Their focus on the historical roots and assumptions that school is supposed to value,

would most likely not be based in urban practices with roots in Afro-Caribbean social and cultural values,

nor view literacy as a “social” anything, -- outside of maybe a book club. Elliot Eisner (2009) would argue

that teachers don’t use objectives seriously, but rather as exercises (p. 109), as “objectives are heuristic

devices which provide initiating consequences which become altered in the flow of instruction…and they

need not precede the selection and organization of content” (p. 111). This is befitting of discursive

curriculum ideally meant for the project, however he would still suggest that prescribed objectives be

present in the process of finalizing objectives throughout the curriculum (p. 112).

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Sociocultural Theory in Second Language Acquisition - Intersections

Certain curricula theorem best intersect with sociolinguistic and sociocultural lenses in second

language acquisition, and these lenses intersect with Hip Hop and ESL pedagogy to explore curricula

approaches and processes from Dewey’s ideological progressivism. To begin our exploration to find points

of intersection, or contradiction, I note that Pennycook (2007) cites Söderman and Folkestad (2004)

describing the ancestry of the educational element of discourse in link with Hip Hop culture:

…hip-hop pedagogies link not only to Deweyan notions of pragmatic

philosophy, aesthetics, and education, and to Freirean-based transformative

pedagogies, but also to Greek concepts of integrated action [mousiké]…And as it

links, it also transforms, changing the nature of those cultural forms it

appropriates (p. 154).

Intersecting with sociocultural theory in second language learning, Claire Kramsch notes that

Vygotsky’s semiotic analysis provides A) the private ability to make meaning by learners recasting their

own words as experiences that include non-native speakers, and immigrants. B) the public ability,

because they are able to choose words and combinations of words that can pass on that experience to a

larger audience of English speakers and ELL students (Lantolf, 2000, p. 151).

Pavlenko and Lantolf further the sociolinguistic intersection of sociocultural second language

learning, with controversial empiricism to “establish ‘retroactive’ first-person narratives as legitimate

source of data on the learning process by teasing out in a theoretically informed way insights provided

by the life stories of people who have struggled through cultural border crossings” (Lantolf, 2000, p.

158). Coinciding with Kellner’s (2001) cultural studies, a learner’s narrative thus becomes an active text,

coupling its conception to the postmodernist realm of anti-entropy and the existentialist ideology within

the postmodern paradigm described by Slattery (2006a, p. 218). These are important to critical

transgressive pedagogy when teaching students through dialoguing and sharing their stories with

complex identities in flux, which is very popular in Hip Hop lyricism narratives. It also challenges action-

researchers and curriculum designers in this field to use first-person narratives and storytelling as a

legitimate source of assessment, when it is ideally set for the purposes of self-actualization. How does

one assess the construction of language, with the construction of identity? Can they be converged and

evaluated, when Border crossings consist not just in using language as a code of communication, but to

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also “cross the border into the domain where selves and worlds are reconstructed” (Lantolf & Thorne, p.

157)? This carries strong parallels in Vygotsky’s thinking on the ontogenetic development of children

into adults (Lantolf, 2000, p. 174), but it sets a huge challenge for assessing language literacy and

proficiency.

Petchauer (2009) adds to the complexity of this argument when he notes, “Global capitalism has

fueled the spread of commoditized cultures such as hip-hop and made it an available resource for

students to use to (re)construct racial identity” (p. 960). Identity and language are related so intricately

within sociolinguistics and sociocultural theory of second language acquisition that they require

constant exploration and attention at the pre-, present-, and post- production and assessment stages of

curriculum building. Having students authentically locate their language use and identity in contexts

where so many identities become commodities is necessary or else parents and teachers disvalue the

use of Hip Hop as a positive motivational force (Ibrahim, 1999; VanPatten & Williams, 2007). We are not

talking about the teaching or assimilation of a “black” voice or English here, but an appropriation of

popular English already surfacing globally and locally in learners, through the critical comparative

analysis of this African American Vernacular in the language curriculum (Cutler, 2008; Jordan, 2007).

Petchauer (2009) provides a literature review of Hip Hop research and notes, “One theoretical resource

that has thus far been underutilized in hip-hop scholarship and that would enable more work in these

areas, and supplement discourse is sociocultural theory as concisely reviewed by Nasir and Hand (2006).

Conceptualizing hip-hop as a community of practice and social network (Wilson, 2007) with localized

language ideologies and epistemologies also complements these sociocultural theories” (p. 966).

Hip Hop is “down with” Dewey and Democracy

When we completely censor Hip Hop’s intellectual empathy, community spirit, and feminist love

that attempts to reconcile for black male hyper-masculinity (Morgan, 1999), and along any political

radicalism in found in Hip Hop, we also immediately exclude excellent dialogical intersections for critical

discourse as curriculum aims for language learning. We are ignoring the fact that internationally, global

Englishes are being learned through Hip Hop under relatively much less media censorship abroad, and

that these points of dialogue are very intriguing to students at the appropriate grade level (Pennycook,

2007a; Pennycook 2007b; Pennycook 2007e). This becomes a fertile ground for teaching language

through civics, citizenship, and participation in the democratic process of being educated in, or outside

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of, a public school. The question remains as to how much role the school maintains in this as a form of

democratic departure.

If we wish to change the norms of how we teach language, then we have to integrate language

in ways outside of the norm of how we treat language in relation to English as our nation’s official and

primary language. Reading, writing, speaking, listening, and interaction are all modalities of English

learning. Majors et al. (2009) hold that most literacy reforms utilizing cognitive research on reading, to

enhance curriculum on teaching, disregard harnessing student’s cultural funds of knowledge and that,

“struggling adolescent students, Black and White, often do not understand what good, expert readers of

literature do” (p. 356). The unpacking of these cognitive tools as themes requires the deconstruction of

the dominant culture of reading in some sense, but the reconstruction of student culture in the spirit of

democratic processes. Nell Noddings’ (2009) holds that education of the individual requires the freedom

to tailor curriculum, without the blinders of reliance on the state system’s design, (p. 426). Any state

system of education that is largely exclusive of urban, lower class, and ESL populations, whether directly

or indirectly, is not acknowledging them in part as struggling to balance their identities and belonging

among their peer and community groups, while also aspiring to be middle class. Hip Hop is not classless,

yet, offers again, a point of artistic and aesthetic critique for this reflection of class struggle and analysis

for a language learning nexus.

“We do not live in a world where people conform mindlessly to the putative rules of language;

we live in a world of language transgressions, impossible without some presumed order worth

transgressing, and made possible by the desire for difference” (Pennycook, 2007, p. 42). Dewey’s (2009)

philosophy called for the dynamic flexibility of education. In that flexibility, lays the virility of an

education and curriculum consisting of multiple American identities, cultures, and languages. Dewey’s

progressive vision would encourage and maintain a momentum against the arguably stagnant

hierarchies that are in place in our current dominant paradigm of curriculum theory in our current state

of education. Shusterman (2000) quoted in Pennycook (2007a) argues that, “rap philosophers are really

“down with” [positively affiliated with] Dewey, not merely in metaphysics but in a non-

compartmentalized aesthetics which highlights social function, process, and embodied experience” (p.

151). For Dewey, education is a process of living socially and not just preparation for future living under

consumerism and utilitarianism under a nation’s economic business plan. Therefore, exploring how

language is used to analyze and resist consumerism, to how it encourages sustainability and

environmentalism is an appealing use of language ecology (Kramsch & Whitehead, 2008).

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Bell Hooks noted that transgressive pedagogy is “both as and for transgression” with “courage

to transgress those boundaries that would confine each pupil to a rote, assembly line approach to

learning” (Pennycook, 2007a, p. 40). It requires us as curriculum designers to invoke “truth telling and

critical consciousness, to recognize limitations, the shift of paradigms, and the desire to “know” beyond

what is readily perceptible…to think differently, to imagine otherwise”, (Hooks, 1994; Kearney, 1988), as

quoted in (Pennycook, 2007, p. 40). Saucedo (2012b) holds that “the human culture is a culture of

building towards humanity that is bigger than Hip Hop and bigger than the classroom, and is meant to

guide them further into lifelong learning”. He continues in the example that, “Teachers don’t put

themselves into positions they are not used to, yet they expect their students to, and that true

pedagogy is not about control, yet, we diminish this control only to be about classroom management”.

When we speak of transgressive teaching, Saucedo (2012b) reminds us of Bell Hooks (1994); in her book,

she mentions --eroticism – when she realized the first time a teacher of hers was attracted to her as a

student. Then, later on in her life, she was attracted to one her students, but that does not need to be

swept under the rug immediately for legal matters, and should be raised in public discussion. This can

become a lesson where a third person tells a story or describes a situation in literature, poetry, or any

canon, where erotic or even romantic attraction, was/is taboo. Yet, in our current paradigm and social

climate, addressing that loss of control is not, [and should not] be such a risky one, because it is about

becoming vulnerable for transformability, so that these relationships are not hidden to resurface as

professional abuse or neglect. Hip Hop was born out of the poorest parts of inner city New York, one of

the oldest cities in colonial America. It could not have come so far, if it had not relied on telling and

dealing with “truths” in a constructive and creative manner through language. Therefore, it is a part of

the heart of America, and all of these elements (e.g. courage, truth telling, critical consciousness,

recognizing limitations, shifting paradigms, and imagining otherwise, [as the “other”], are to be seen as

natural human occurrences. Transgressive teaching then becomes us putting these elements into

everyday practice to traverse the many implicit and explicit linguistic boundaries that attach themselves

to our social psyche.

Nell Nodding’s notes that, “aims-talk is to education is what freedom is to democracy”,

(Noddings, p. 426), and I seek for my curriculum to allow “students to participate in the construction of

their own learning objectives” (Noddings, p. 427). It may difficult at first for any teacher to transverse

any training based on highly analytic and scientifically pre-prescribed objectives (Bobbitt, 2009; Popham,

2009). Therefore, at first I will imbue objectives in “wet cement”, but will leave them to be chiseled

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away with my students. This is necessary because in disagreement with Bobbitt’s (2009) error-based

hierarchy of teachable English language components, Long’s interaction theory, among many in the field

of second language acquisition, show that children and adolescents develop different language elements

over time, at different paces (Mitchell & Myles, 2001; VanPatten & Williams, 2007). Therefore, Bobbitt’s

depiction of language acquisition is science fiction, not scientific non-fiction in building objectives for

language learning. Private speech, and directed speech from their parents or by transmission from their

teachers, is learned through interaction and sociocultural theory-based participatory practices in

teaching, not in a numbered prioritized list of grammatical functions as Bobbitt (2009) claims (pp. 18-

19).

At-risk youth, ESL populations, and incarcerated youth mostly stem from adjacent communities

and school districts, and one of my aims is to circumvent the tools of the “sorting machine” (over

reliance on standardization) that Noddings' describes as the parallel of Plato’s soul. It also circumvents

the meritocracy, instead by empowering students from all backgrounds to share their stories, and learn

language through transgressive pedagogy to coalesce their communication for language development.

This requires the aim that curriculum work across paradigms, and ontological boundaries. In terms of

academic and community material, it seeks to answer both, “What is done about the children who come

from homes where these matters are not taught well?” (Noddings, 2009, p. 436), and, what is done

about those who may not learn well in regular school?

Slattery (2006a, 2006b) aligns with this direction of aims in calling for, “Reflection, renewal, and

innovation to move beyond both progressive and conservative curriculum development models of the

past” (Slattery, p. 221). Therefore, I hold that this does not obliterate the possibility of any combination

of postmodern and transgressive theory or praxis, but instead requires our responsibility of being

flexible in their synergy; while constantly questioning the aims, conceptions, and directions of applying

transgressive theory into curricular praxis, we must constantly explore which elements fit best to our

learners and constituents. Within curriculum, it can be surmised to involve aspects of Slattery (2006a,

2006b) by building open-ended educational objectives, building some objectives with students

discursively, deconstructing both human and linguistic roles, uses, and identities, and reconstructing

students’ disagreements and agreements on the placement of themselves and their languages in the

education system. John Dewey’s (2009) belief that education is the fundamental method of social

progress and reform applies when we can shift the conscious display of where we value ESL students,

their subculture, and therefore the subculture, art forms, and lifestyle of the Hip Hop generation.

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“Sharing in the social consciousness, and the activity based on social consciousness, Is the only sure

method of social reconstruction” (Dewey, 2009, p. 40). This is less controversial or eccentric when we

consider how many teachers are often the one and only role model for particular students seeking

better lives. When framed in the paradigm of progressive theory John Dewey notes, “Language is a

logical instrument, and a social instrument; it is the device for communication; a tool for sharing ideas

and feelings with others (Dewey, 2009, p. 38). This instrument then must be played and valued for its

innovative and productive value in linguistic communication, and Slattery’s ideas offer objectives for

troubled youth, ESL students, and struggling students, within their lives, and not simply to recite

someone else’s basics, or classics about lives of which they may not be familiar or interested in.

To link academic learning to communities who lack academe as a cultural value, or whom are

completely misinformed or unfamiliar with the rich moral, cultural, and textual messages and values of

Hip Hop, does not require more effort on schools; it requires innovation by educators. Saucedo (2012b)

approaches his teaching using the notion of storyboarding, but with the focus being on songwriting;

vocabulary mastery and telling your own story. “I tell my students, if you don’t tell your story then

someone else will, and it’s all about leading them to the understanding that their words have power”.

When you can attribute it to an essay, he suggests by starting with an identity poem (where they are

from), [which I expand upon here]: as an, “I am from, I am at, I am going” poem, and this holds

implications for use of the ‘personal voice’ in academic writing (Gordon, 2007). Close attention to

sociolinguistics is necessary here as Saucedo (2012b) asks his students to be “Masters of their own

destiny, and does a lot of identity work, and a lot of scaffolding group work, instead of placing a lot

performance on the individual, and through a lot of remix work”. For example, “as a small group,

students get to choose their favorite lines from a poem, song, or chorus, or song, and they all perform it.

They get to make value judgments on what they feel was strong in their writing, and get to write in a

group environment and validation” (Saucedo, 2012b). This involves Vygotsky’s zone of proximal

development (Lantolf, 2000) using a triadic method with three or more language learners. This small

‘crew’ formation has been a strong element in Hip Hop culture, and is the strongest component of Hip

Hop pedagogy for connecting the community. Dance is also a great area for validation of ELL’s, as it can

incorporate so many different cultures, and offers them chances to negotiate choreography using many

symbolisms in their body languages (Saucedo, 2012b). Considering all of this requires us to invoke John

Dewey’s progressive philosophy to connect schools to the community, and the pursuit of democracy and

freedom, and the expression of this pursuit - as we see fit. “The critical philosophy of transgression is the

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methodological investigation of how to understand ourselves, our histories, and how the boundaries of

thought may be traversed…they [are] to give new and wide impetus to the undefined work of freedom

(Foucault, 1984, p. 46) via (Pennycook, 2007, p. 42).

Discursive practices, existentialism, and the push and pull towards a paradigm shift

For the following section, Push factors involve those theorists, theories, and practices “pushing

towards or past” the current educational paradigm shift in American education. Pull factors involve those

theorists, theories, and practices moving along the paradigm shift, yet, still connecting to the current

paradigmatic state of American Education, while attempting to “pull them forward”. Nell Noddings’ (2009)

“aims-talk” for me revolves around the fact of how students who are not learning in standard goals-

objectives curriculum can learn through transgressive curriculum and pedagogy. It has been said already

that this cognate project would be much easier to implement as an administrator, not as a teacher; so,

why is that? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that paradigm shifts are amorphous phenomenon,

requiring unyielding philosophical conflict and compromise, in order to form new epistemologies that

constitute paradigmatic shifts. If so, then we should consider that “Rap is a postmodern popular art that

challenges some of our most deeply entrenched aesthetic conventions, conventions which are common

not only to modernism as an artistic style and ideology but to the philosophical doctrine of modernity and

its differentiation of cultural spheres. Hip Hop challenges modernism by the emphasis of ‘the localized and

temporal rather than the putatively universal and eternal’”, (Pennycook, 2007, p. 11). Hip Hop is a cultural

lifestyle and art form that is existential, so it is becoming of the transgressive paradigm of education

according to Pennycook (2007a) so it deserves discussion involving paradigm shifts, wherever it may lie, as

a push, or pull factor, within that transition.

“Hip Hop’s triad of graffiti, dance, and rap are ‘post-apocalyptic arts, scratches on the decaying

surfaces of post-industrial urban America”, (Pennycook, p. 12). There many areas around the world that

still reflect this post-industrial aura, where city-dwellers are learning Englishes among rural-dwellers.

This fact offers complex challenges and opportunities for Hip Hop and TESOL teachers in different

localities to ask how, why, and when it is learned and used as both push and pull factors for paradigm

shift.

Hip Hop has more obstacles of belonging in academic literacy or academe than American English

(the language), ever has, and arguably, ever will. As a catalyst then, Englishes floats between being the

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local, and the international language, but not between them dichotomously (Pennycook, 2007, p. 44).

McKay’s (2002) definition for international language includes it “in both a global and a local sense” (p. 5)

yet, recognizable in her definition that English is a language of “wider communication” and arguably,

one of commerce as a sub-current of culture in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

(TESOL). McKay (2002) further places English in an expanding circle where “English does not have official

status, and, in quoting (Kachru, 1992), “has not become institutionalized with locally developed

standards of use” (McKay, p. 10). This begins the conversation on whether or not TESOL instructors can

justify how and why Hip Hop is a conduit for teaching the English language inside of particular curricular

paradigms in their institution or placement, as both a push and pull factor.

Attempting to extract TESOL away from a scholarly versus non-scholarly dichotomous

relationship is what Pennycook (2007a, 2007d) supports in his transgressive theoretical sub-concept of

transculturation. “Transculturation may be understood as a ‘phenomenon of the contact zone’

describing how ‘subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them

by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (Pennycook, 2007a, p. 7). Petchauer (2009) offers a clear

example of dichotomous relativity found in Hip Hop culture between low SES students who may aspire

to the entrepreneurial success and shrewd business investment mentality and reality in U.S. popular

culture, versus the critique of capitalism or affirmation of racial identity and a solidarity reality (p. 955).

However, Pennycook (2007a) is interested is escaping debates over globalization versus localization, and

instead on: Fluidity – as language and culture as the movement and flows of music across time and

space, and Fixity –as the ways in which music is about location, tradition, and cultural expression.

Facilitating students’ perceptions of where they picture themselves within the spectrum between the

transgressive and the post-modernist theory requires a discursive curriculum that incorporates the

complexities of capitalist and grassroots solidarity within and through language awareness and use. The

language remains the focus of choice given to students in how they choose to adjust their fluidity and

fixity, as either vernaculars are found in the locality of capitalism, or the grassroots solidarity, and have

equal hold in any given situation that is most salient to their knowledge and language use. Drawing

lesson plans around a documentary like Bling: A Planet Rock are suitable starting points (Cepeda, 2007)

as a pull factor to connect first world to 3rd world global education that Bruner (2009) would agree with.

Contrasting fluidity of scapes and fixity of place, we explore how music and language (Hip Hop &

English) are simultaneously fluid and fixed, move across space, borders, communities, and nations but

also become localized, indigenized, and re-created in the local. “Caught between fluidity and fixity,

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cultural and linguistic forms are always in a state of flux, always changing, always part of a process of the

refashioning of identity”, (Pennycook, 2007a, p. 8), and thus, are moving much faster and in more

frequent and discursive fluxes than mainstream paradigmatic currents of curriculum theory. Thus, “the

spatiality of the ‘trans’, it is suggested, may be more useful than the temporality of the ‘post’”,

(Pennycook, 2007a, p. 13), and this allows us to define where and when the push and pull factors apply,

and are being applied.

Of the many re-conceptualists that can ground the trajectory of Hip Hop and ESL curriculum,

William Pinar (2009), and existentialist Nell Noddings (2009) elaborate best upon the need for

educational aims to trump over goals and objectives (Noddings, 2009, p. 427). Standards must be

integrated skillfully. Saucedo (2012b) notes, “arts-integration is bigger than hip-hop (he notes his

curriculums integration of himself as a visual artist, a poet and a language teacher) for artistic craft to

meet academic standards – and requires young people to synthesize what their learning into their own

words and to have them publish it, is the mutable challenge”. This is not easy when we speak of this

synthesis into a different genre required for the American standard written essay, but it can when

scaffolding language and poems. Curricular freedom is required to escape stagnation of both technical

and technological rationality (Pinar, 2009, p. 173), which is antithetical to the Tyler Rationale but must

also maintain a dialect with students about how and why it seeks such freedom (Pinar, p. 174).

Curriculum must function in emancipatory ways within a “critical theory of society” (Pinar, 2009, pp.

173-174), just as Hip Hop functioned to liberate urban youth and their minds from schools, economies,

and systems that were failing them, curriculum becomes the instrument for freedom and pushes

students in emancipatory ways. Hip Hop lyricism, as a form of poetry, can also be formed into prose.

Pennycook (2007a) suggests the need to move “beyond the ‘post’ frameworks because of the

inevitable ways in which they are always looking over their shoulders at the past. The reconceptualist

Pinar (2009) seems to offer the idea that we as curriculum designers need not be exclusive in settling on

only using the traditional, conceptual-empiricism, or reconceptualization in curricular theory (p. 174).

But in fact, Pinar notes, that each is reliant upon the other, and we must nurture each “moment”, its

“internal dialectic” and must strive for synthesis, for a series of perspectives on curriculum that are at

once empirical, interpretative, critical, and emancipatory (Pinar, p. 174). Pennycook (2007a) seems to

de-thread this weaving made by Pinar, and he details his attempt to “move on” from poststructuralist,

postmodern, and postcolonial critiques of knowledge, and posits that, “positions are to be read as

contingent, histories as local, subjects as constructed, and knowledge as enmeshed in power” (p. 38).

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This situates the nexus of curriculum theory and practice within the sphere of intimate understanding(s)

and investigation(s) between the teacher and the student as discursive– respectively. It localizes Hip

Hop, ESL, and leaves a lot of wiggle room, but remains hinged to being a discursive practice, which

allows us control over the push and pull factors towards paradigmatic shift.

Nell Noddings' discusses the incompatibility of aims with objectives and procedures --

(embodied through the questioning of them by Kliebard, and the static holdings of them by Adler,

Bobbitt, and Popham) – about prespecified objectives (p. 427), and the Cardinal Principles Report. This

discussion parallels transgressive theory, “The motion of transgression, then, escapes the limits of

dialectical thinking and…refutes the modernist hope of ideological critique and demystification and

moves towards alterity, [which is] so important for thinking about domains such as popular culture, hip

hop, and arguably, language” (Pennycook, 2007, p. 42). The perception of “otherness” and “other”

language(s) should not be considered a cultural deficit in an ethnocentric way when forming or

implementing curriculum involving dialogue, but instead must stem from social capital and communal

cultural wealth empowered by teachers and students (Valenzuela, 2009), especially if we are speaking of

an ever-growing multi-lingual student population. Petchauer (2009) notes research that argues against

Noddings regarding educational objectives, “research of critical consciousness in Freirean pedagogy and

its intent must clearly demonstrate causal links between hip-hop-based interventions and observed

outcomes” (p. 954). Causal links my not imply specific outcomes linked to specific objectives, but instead

may offer insight to forming objectives and aims-based procedures when facilitating the “otherness”

and alterity of discussions, dialogues, or assessments from students who perceive Englishes, and Hip

Hop culture’s many Englishes in different ways. Again, both a controlling instrument for pushing and

pulling the paradigmatic shift.

Slattery’s (2006a, 2006b) postmodernism is antithetical to the traditionalism and perrenialism

found in Bobbitt (2009), Hirsh, and Tyler (2009). Slattery (2006b) moves for “reflection, renewal, and

innovation to move beyond both progressive and conservative curriculum development models of the

past”, (p. 221). Although not a transgressive theory per se, Slattery’s (2006b) postmodern, perspectives

most relevant to language learning include push factors: 1) A philosophical movement that seeks to

expose the internal contradictions of metanarratives by deconstructing modern notions of truth,

language, knowledge, and power. 2) A radical eclecticism (not compromise or consensus), and double-

voiced discourse form of identity and linguistic border-crossing that accepts and criticizes at the same

time, because the past and the future are both honored and subverted, embraced and limited,

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constructed and deconstructed. And, 3) an acknowledgement and celebration of otherness particularly

from racial, gendered, sexual, linguistic, and ethnic perspectives, (p. 224).

Hip Hop as Transformative Praxis

Diaz et al. (2010-2011) note that Hip-hop theatre's inclusion of actual, live rap music and DJ

scratching and sampling, its allowance for freestyle improvisation, its embrace of non-linearity and

presentational direct address to the audience, breaks with conventional theatrical realism and reflect

contemporary artistic directions. Transgressive praxis is the more useful way forward than to think

through an unfortunate dichotomy between theory and practice, which is being repeated in TESOL

methods (Pennycook, 2007d, p. 342; Pennycook, 2007f). Thus, the theoretical groundwork for the

curriculum should clearly aim for little to no separation between student/teacher as artist, and

learner/listener as participant. The audience in Hip Hop is meant to be interactive, and appeals for social

action aim at the audience and community for transformative change. This calls for the revaluation of

standard TESOL praxis against transgressive praxis, which is perhaps the most controversial for TESOL,

because it asks that TESOL instructors not rely so heavily on popular American culture and Americanized

English. Hip Hop culture can be comparable and contrasted against pop culture, while, not avoiding the

concurrent duty for critically analyzing Hip Hop’s usefulness and placement as a subculture within, and

separate from pop culture. Thus, it can be a conduit of equal value within critical TESOL (Pennycook,

2007d).

Essential to curriculum theory, is that in some senses certain languages are indigenous, where

English is not. To those cultural resources, and with students in English as Foreign Language (EFL)

environments, we should be including their languages in some way to avoid cultural and linguistic

imperialism at worst, and seeking innovation for transculturation and transliteration practices at best. The

essence of transformative praxis, to have students build and transform their world through new ways of

learning (not just language), seeing the world, and redefining themselves, just as Hip Hoppers have done,

is profound, but not unfamiliar to youth. This type of education is embedded throughout Hip-Hop history,

making the study of its culture, leaders, literature, music, movies, and artifacts essential to the exploration

and growth of language, and identity within youth movements. In communities around the nation, youth

are learning to organize and build community, collaborate on music, publish books, and start businesses

through Hip-Hop (Hip Hop, 2010; Reeken, 2009; Zulu Nation, 2012), where their own public schools have

failed them. Yet, not enough prominence is given to the ways that Hip-Hop–based education and

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pedagogy can be used to transform our society (Diaz et al., 2010-2011) in this current American

educational paradigm.

Reflections

During this report, I learned that I must pursue how training students in ethnographic analysis is

conceptualized into action research and teacher practice. I learned I have much more to understand in

applied linguistics, grammar, and language arts to show how to use lyrics and lyricism formally as a

pedagogical tool for meta-understanding of language. I learned that only the post-modern and

transgressive curricular paradigms and theorists could keep up with what are the necessary parameters

for grasping the study and teaching of language through a culture as permeable, fluid, and transient as

Hip Hop. Hip Hop is indeed, enacted as a “lived curriculum”, (Pennycook, 2007a, pp. 143, 152). I learned

that I still have questions. Nell Noddings' (2009) aims-based argument gets back to one of the cores of the

essentialists’ earlier question, of which, I add the following questions, how can we justify connecting

students, the community, and both of their cultures to schools, when we speak of only goals and objectives

that may exclude those students and communities? More broadly, how can curriculum theory and practice

become a more discursive process involving students and communities in the development and

implementation of curriculum? Lastly, influenced by Barone & Swierzbin (2010), Why must we focus on

“teaching the curriculum” or “teaching the text”, when we should be teaching the “learner”?

I have also come to believe that critical pedagogy is empowering those in a revolutionary spirit

through musical and linguistic means, yet by studying the militant artistically; one can engage students

without militant means in a democratic society. To uplift students and cultivate a community based on

love, humility, and faith in man’s desire to live free from dominance, and to have students prevail in their

autonomy, and through the control of their valued/common language, is transformative. Farbeon

Saucedo (2012b) notes, “When you get past the art form of Hip Hop, and view it as a revolutionary act,

then most students see the linguistic pursuits as the game of mastering the language, either implicitly or

explicitly depending on the age group”. Fabien “Farbeon” Saucedo calls himself a ‘performer practitioner,

a custodian of my culture’ and declares that ‘my young people push me to learn new things, in that

shared learning; it is both helping us share in the building of agency for change”. As Americans, we all

define ourselves differently, not just in language, but also in culture. Our colonial ancestors challenged a

dominant international empire; they also challenged the foundations and uses of the King’s English,

remixed it, and we as contemporaries continue to transform it. Our American ancestors (of all relations),

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also practiced a unified reflection through written and spoken dialogue, to form the living document that

guides our nation. It behooves us then to continue this tradition for those suppressed, and for those who

attempt to suppress, that revolutionary spirit as our country’s democracy evolves. This suppression must

be met with new ways of thought and action, and thus, new ways of education.

Appendix A -- SCT Break-dance Questions – Student

1. What language do you hear your own mind speaking to you when you dance?

2. What key words do you listen for to relay ideas, instructions, or movements to yourself?

3. What body language do you consciously choose, or think you unconsciously exhibit, to help you learn?

4. What images or symbolism have you, or do you use, presently or plan to use in the future to learn?

5. Do you practice in the mirror alone, if so, how and why?

6. Do you practice in the mirror when in class, if so, how and why?

7. Describe your interactions with your peers when practicing. How do their verbal and body communications differ, or mimic your own, or your teachers?

37


8. Indicate your level of agreement with this statement on a scale of one-to-five (1 – Mostly Agree, 2 – Agree, 3 – Neutral, 4 – Disagree, 5 – Mostly Disagree): “Breakdancing can be learned alone, without any interaction”

9. Indicate your level of agreement with this statement on a scale of one-to-five (1 – Mostly Agree, 2 – Agree, 3 – Neutral, 4 – Disagree, 5 – Mostly Disagree): “Breakdancing can be learned with ANY other person learning along with me”

10. Indicate your level of agreement with this statement on a scale of one-to-five (1 – Mostly Agree, 2 – Agree, 3 – Neutral, 4 – Disagree, 5 – Mostly Disagree): “Breakdancing can be learned with only one other person learning with me who is equally skilled or equally experienced”

11. Indicate your level of agreement with this statement on a scale of one-to-five (1 – Mostly Agree, 2 – Agree, 3 – Neutral, 4 – Disagree, 5 – Mostly Disagree): “Breakdancing can be learned with only one other person learning with me who is more advanced in skill or in experience”

12. Have you reviewed any books that provide written or visually based instruction on how to teach Break dancing, if so, what do you think about these books?

13. Has break dancing or any element of Hip Hop helped you learn English, or helped you in any of your academic subjects in school, if so, please describe how?

14. Do you imagine yourself as anyone or anything different when you are dancing? If so, can you please draw or describe it on this page:

38


Appendix B – Questions on Teaching English through Hip Hop culture

1) Describe your knowledge of second language acquisition, Teaching English as a Second Language, or

applied linguistics. (You may or may not include scholarly references).

2) Can English be taught through any element of Hip Hop culture? If so, how do you see it most fitting for

your students?

3) Do you believe Hip Hop is a universal language? If so, how would you define someone who uses this

language to learn other languages?

4) Describe your methods, practices, tools, and experience in teaching non-native speakers of English.

5) What do you think is the most critical use of media (classroom technology, online tools, clouds,

software, YouTube, movies, songs, documentary, music videos, etc.) applicable for teaching English as a

language, learning about language, and/or about Hip Hop as a language OR culture?

6) Please place any pictures, objects, graphs, charts, or other questions you think and feel were not

addressed, and you think or feel most describe any further elaborations you wish to make.

39


Appendix C – Lyrics from the song “Love Anew (Hip Hop Version)” copyright © of live video taped

performance on July 27th, 2012 by Alexander S. Templeton. Courtesy of WARCRY Records and

productions.

(Verse 1)

There you were again, out of somewhere, you were everywhere

Congratulations I said, your ring had a magnetic glare

All those years my heart wondered - would I be prepared?

To die alone, because I never loved again – why would I dare?

to think you hadn't moved on, we were young - after all

just kids we said – we couldn't have known – as the curtains fall

Remember when's and pretending then

That we could only - just be friends

But in that moment we went from memories to sharing breaths,

Again and again, again and again,

We can GET 2 OUR cores without sinning to win,

From a new beginning how about our family and friends???

You BROUGHT MY heart out the shadows

Here’s TO LOOKIN’ AT YOU, cause we’re both looking ahead

To some new days – I love it when we swoon – and when we groove

to a full moon – you know me – I know you, we pull through every truth

So I really hope ya dig the tune – because you gotta know that I’m so in love with you

(oooh oooooh ooooh….

40


Chorus x 1 (along with digitally sampled chorus): Never too late, never too soon, never too old,

For Love Anew

(Verse 2)

Nobody really makes the rules how to make a happy home

a house is a just a framework so look out for danger zones

we've seen the shallow hearted - and just how the strangers roam

misguided by their vices – while their virtues are swept along

under the rugs – in the closets –

hide the tears – turn on the faucets

no more facades – no more tonics

no more fun – is that what they call this?

I think not – because the body is just a shell

A hidden welcome mat to the own private hell,

I loved you – I let go – I let it all out – just to let it all in,

So –

To try to make means to the ends -

We never failed, ---if we never really tried,

Another try means another shot at love --and a new life -

And every real man deserves a real loving wife.

Every real chance is like a line that I write defined

And every rhyme is a reason why we should never settle – we should both climb to new heights

And you lovin’ me – well that makes it ALL-RIGHT

41


Chorus x 2 (along with digitally sampled chorus): Never too late, never too soon, never too old,

For Love Anew

(Verse 3)

We can talk anytime about our exes

To laugh and rationalize love's insurrections

We revisit sweet revolt – in our reminiscence

And I love you, and all of our imperfections

Like the eyes of child, and how other couples smile

From our unborn bough, I know how to fight for you now…

You're that flame, the one who got away, the years passed by – and I died everyday…

And believe me - I've tried everyway

To avoid complaints, the jaded, and the fake

And I've done well, cause here we sit (still) today…

You remind me of the oldies that I sang by the graves –

From the cradles of our love – I hope we really make a babe –

Cause that would make any day – and my nights – and my years –

To grow old with you near – endearingly never fear –

To show love? Ya gotta know love (that’s really clear)

Until that day I die – I leave behind this song so you can always hear --- (hear hear baby) ….

Chorus x 2 (along with digitally sampled chorus):

Never too late, never too soon, never too old,

For Love Anew (along with various freestyle and singing)

42


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Templeton.curriculumTheory.fall.2012.Draft2

Documents

oxford university press

sonoma state university

digitally sampled chorus

home box office

curriculum theory conduit

esl pedagogical practice

socially mediated processes

wordless picture books