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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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
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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
“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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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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Running Head: CURRICULUM THEORY CONDUIT: HIP HOP AND ESL PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
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),
36
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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?
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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
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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.
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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….
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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
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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)
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