Hip Hop High
Posted Dec 15 2007
Is your Game tight?It's a message other educators around the country are starting to hear. In classrooms from Los Angeles to Philadelphia and everywhere in between, teachers realize that the popularity of hip-hop is a powerful tool that can be used to engage students and teach everything from English to algebra to the periodic table of the elements in chemistry class.
"Hip-hop is a very powerful educational tool; it's very exciting," says Toni Blackman, the U.S.Department of State's ambassador of hip-hop (yes, that's a real title) since 2001. "Teaching has to change. When teachers have to compete with technology and media for students' attention, you have to get your game tight if you want to succeed."
The birth of hip-hop in New York City in the early 1970s is generally credited to a DJ named Kool Herc, who recited and chanted improvised rhymes over reggae records. The music, which quickly grew more polished, features a rapper delivering syncopated spoken lyrics over a heavy beat, and was one of the first musical forms to strip away live instrumentation and emphasize lyrics and rhythms. Hip-hop, filled with slang and street-smart stories, quickly became a driving force in New York's youth culture. In the 1980s, thanks to pioneering music from groups such as the Sugarhill Gang and Run-DMC, rap and hip-hop quickly received nationwide attention. Today, led by such artists as Eminem, 50 Cent, Ludacris, and Nelly, hip-hop is the one of the biggest-selling categories of music. It is to America's global cultural heritage what jazz was eighty years ago.
Dawn-Elissa Fischer has seen the power of hip-hop in a classroom.Fischer teaches at Laney College, in Oakland, California, a post she took after spending time at Harvard University as an education-outreach coordinator at that school's Hiphop Archive. (The archive, which she now consults for, has since relocated to Stanford University.) One of Fischer's first jobs in education was at Washington Middle School, in Springfield, Illinois. When Fischer arrived at the school, more than 70 percent of the students in her English class were failing."I'm a member of the hip-hop generation," she says. "I used hip-hop to facilitate my own critical-thinking process, so I wanted to use it in the classroom."Fischer brought local hip-hop artists into the classroom, and played radio-friendly edits of popular songs to study parts of speech and other grammatical lessons. The results were astounding:At the end of her program, only two of the 150 students failed. The turnaround "was surprising even to me," she says.
One person who isn't surprised is Keith Morikawa, an aspiring filmmaker who recently completed his first documentary, Reading Between the Rhymes, which looks at teachers using hip-hop to educate. Morikawa traveled from coast to coast filming educators, attending conferences, and meeting with hip-hop artists for his film.
Morikawa recalls a trip to a high school freshman classroom."The teacher warned me that the kids could be rowdy around cameras," he says."We had three cameras set up, and not one student flinched.They were all fixated on what he was talking about,which was Tupac and race. As far as getting their attention and doing what the teacher wants, I don't think I've ever seen anything better."
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