By:

The arguments around inclusion of popular culture in education are many and various, from inclusion and validation of cultures outside the classroom, to issues of motivation and engagement. In this paper I intend to take these arguments further by looking at hip-hop and education across a number of contexts: First workshops run for youths in local community contexts, where the focus is on hip-hop as a means of local expression, and the development of multiple skills (literacy, music, graffiti) for disadvantaged youth; second, learning within hip-hop practices, where young people educate each other in graffiti, breaking and MCing as part of an informal educational process; third, hip-hop as pedagogy, in which rap lyrics are used to develop awareness of language and politics; and finally, hip-hop culture as part of classroom culture, where the emphasis is not so much on the inclusion of hip-hop as classroom material, but rather for the broader understanding of hip-hop culture as transgressive art, as a challenge to norms of language, identity and ownership.

As educators we need to engage with the transcultural flows within which our students are located: Global flows of English and popular culture turn classrooms in many parts of the world into spaces of transcultural contact. Students can no longer be understood as located in a bounded time and space in and around their classrooms but rather are participants in a much broader set of transcultural practices. In order to be attentive to the politics of location in the global context, we need to understand how hip-hop brings fixity, flow and fluidity into all our classes and how hip-hop as pedagogy operates across numerous sites outside our classrooms.

Stream: Community, Culture, Globalisation, Literacy, Language, Multiliteracies

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Alastair Pennycook is Professor of Language in Education at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has published widely on cultural and political implications of the global spread of English, colonialism and language policy, plagiarism and intertextuality, and critical applied linguistics. He is the author of The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (Longman, 1994), English and the Discourses of Colonialism (Routledge, 1998), and Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001). He is currently working on an edited book (with Sinfree Makoni), Disinventing and Reinventing Language (Multilingual Matters) and is writing a book on language, globalization and hip hop, Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (Routledge).