Week 3: Hip-Hop Language & Pop Culture in the Classroom

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Key/Critical Issues in the Readings:

One of the major issues that the readings for Week 3 focused on was the complexity of modes of popular culture, especially hip-hop, and the need to recognize these modes of popular culture in the classroom.  In part, this is an argument to include and validate various forms of popular expression, however, it is also an argument to shift our thinking about what constitutes “school knowledge.” As Pennycook explains, “Rather than viewing hip-hop as a hook to motivate students or as a cultural archive to be included in the curriculum, they [those who participate in hip-hop pedagogies] look outward into the larger world of which classrooms are a part.  As they do so, they shift a sense of what school knowledge is and of how it relates to the larger context” (148). 

Expanding the definition of “school knowledge” is particularly important for these authors in the realm of language education.  Specifically, they argue against teaching/promoting only the standard dialect in the language classroom because of the ways in which language use is involved in identity formation.  As Pennycook explains, “a performative understanding of language suggests that identities are formed in the linguistic performance rather than pregiven, and that language use is an act of identity which calls that language into being” (157).  Further, “to exclude the popular from educational contexts is to reject student culture and difference” (Pennycook 144).  Further, just as language use in and of itself has ideological underpinnings, so too does the teaching of language.  As H. Samy Alim points out, “language pedagogies are inherently ideological, enforcing certain norms at the expense of others” (166).  Therefore, as a group, these articles and book chapters seek to promote a broader understanding of language and culture and their uses in the classroom for positive student identity formation.

Questions/Concerns About the Readings:

In his article concerning (in part) the ways in which a group of continental African students were co-opted into Black American culture by others, Awad El Karim M. Ibrahim defines the term “social imaginary.”  He explains that the “social imaginary” is “a discursive space or a representation in which they [the students] are already constructed, imagined, and positioned and thus are treated by the hegemonic discourses and dominant groups, respectively as Blacks” (353).  The problem, of course, in this is that “this positionality…does not acknowledge the differences in the students’ ethnicities, languages, nationalities, and cultural identities” (353).  

One major question for me this week is this:  by assuming that our students all have access to elements/modes of popular culture, like hip-hop, aren’t we as instructors creating a “social imaginary” too?

For example, Alim declares that the current group of students is a “hip-hop generation” (167) and claims that although he does begin linguistic activities with his students by “raising students’ awareness to the variety of lexical innovations within hip-hop culture” that in any case “of course, most students are already aware of this, because they actively participate in these innovations” (170, my emphasis). Maybe most of his students are already aware, but my guess is that this changes classroom to classroom. My guess is that he has a preconceived notion of what the students will and won’t be aware of and acts accordingly. Of course, on some level this is inescapable, but it seems like something that we should try to pay particular attention to as instructors. I want to make sure to illustrate that I don’t mean to claim that raising awareness of BSE or hip-hop culture in traditionally non-BSE communities or classrooms is not a productive and useful activity of cultural awareness.  I think it is. It is just that we need to be careful of the expectations that we have of our students.  We have to remember, as Ibrahim notes of his students the “differences in the students’ ethnicities, languages, nationalities, and cultural identities” (353).     

Pennycook admits that utilizing hip-hop/pop culture might be problematic for some students: “students from non-mainstream backgrounds may not have easy access to the cultural resources of other students.  It may be important, therefore, both to assist those students with gaining such access and to be cautious about shared popular cultural references across a diverse student body” (145). I’m not sure exactly who he means by “non-mainstream backgrounds.” Students from religious backgrounds that prohibit immersion in pop culture? ESL students? Students that live in small, racially and culturally homogenous communities? Middle-class white kids from the suburbs? I dunno. In any case, his solution is “to assist those students with gaining access.”

So my other major question is this, how are we as instructors supposed to assist these students if we are not “in the know” ourselves? Does this mean that we all need to take classes on pop culture or watch MTV consistently to be good, thoughtful teachers?    

Week 2: Globalization and World Englishes

Hi Everyone, I want to begin by hedging a bit here and noting that I’ve never kept a blog before and I’m not quite sure of the genre restraints. Specifically, I’m not sure quite how cohesive to make this, or the expected tone.  So, I’m just going to try to deal with the questions that are asked under this heading on the syllabus and hope that I'm not the right track. 

Key/Critical Issues in the Readings:

As the heading for Week 2 on the syllabus indicates, the readings all dealt with attitudes surrounding issues of globalization and World Englishes. As Pennycook notes in the second chapter of Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, there are two general ways that people have seen the spread of English across the globe: the imperial view and the pluralistic view. On one hand, there is a major concern with a new kind of cultural imperialism. From this point of view, English is often seen as “a language of threat, desire, destruction and opportunity” (Pennycook 5). Seeing the spread of English as a homogenization process, some like Ayo Bamgose, are worried about the ability of local communities to maintain “culturally determined varieties of world Englishes in the face of pressures to achieve viable international communication” (359). The other side of the argument is a pluralist view, which looks at English as “a pluralized entity” rather than as a monolithic spread across the world (Pennycook 20).  This view however, seems overly reliant on the production of new standard Englishes within national contexts (ala the circles diagram) (Pennycook 20).   

Both Pennycook and Kingsley Bolton take a kind of middle view of this situation, arguing that one must remember the historical implications of the spread of English, but also be willing to see that “English is a translocal language, a language of fluidity and fixity that moves across, while becoming embedded in, the materiality of localities and social relations” (Pennycook 6).  In other words, while the historical imperialism shouldn’t be forgotten, we have to see the invention of cross-cultural Englishes as part of larger “postindustrial signifying practices” that works to “reorganize the local” rather than just imitate the American (Pennycook 7).  While Pennycook fixes his attention on hip-hop culture as an illustration of this transcultural/translocal flow, Bolton relies on the ways in which English literature and “creativity” is extended through exposure to contact literatures and transcultural writers (460).  Aya and Paul Kei Matsuda also seem to take a centralist view of global Englishes, arguing that in the classroom, while it is important to “make the dominant codes available to students who seek them” (371), it is also important to focus on situated uses of dialects, and to not adopt a kind of imperialistic tone in teaching the standard.

Situating the Work in What I Study/Questions and Concerns about the Reading:

First, it is important, I think, to remember that English and English literature actually have quite a long history of being “transcultural.” I have a hard time not being annoyed when authors (ie Bolton) seem to indicate that transcultural-ness is a new thing that is shaking up something that was monolithic in the first place.  Codification and standardization did not happen until the 18^th century—English has been around a lot longer than that.  During the Medieval period, English was effected by Celtic, Scandinavian (Norse), Latin, and later, most especially, French languages and cultures. In fact, one of the things that makes it so difficult for non-native speakers to learn English is that we have all sorts of weird carryovers from our various lexical (and sometimes even grammatical) borrowings.  Anyway, my point is just that it is important to be careful, I think, when thinking about the history of English in the context of World Englishes to remember that before there was an imperial past and an attempt at standardization, there was a past where England itself was being conquered (by the Scandinavians, by the Catholic Church, and by the French) and changed by those relationships that it had with other cultures.  And that, we are still speaking the effects of those relationships today, in both academic and nonstandard (AAVE for instance) dialects.

My Final (and Probably More Interesting) Concern:

In chapter 3, Pennycook begins talking about what he calls “transmodality,” or the “somatic turn” in critical theory (48).  Many feminists have begun to question the discursive turn as well, their response has been (in part) the rise of “New Materialism,” which is often likewise characterized as a turn towards the body.  However, these feminists (and here I’m thinking of Stacy Alaimo, Karan Barad and others) have chosen to say: look, discourse is not everything. It does not cover the realities of my body. And, how interesting that the linguistic turn has come along at a time when women’s experiences (and bodies) were becoming relevant to critical theory. In short, these women reject the notion that discourse is everything, all the time.

Pennycook, at least the way that I read him, does not in fact reject the idea that discourse is everything (“we should no longer have to argue that subjects are discursively constructed…that there is no position outside discourse” (43)).  While he notes the shortcomings of the linguistic turn: “all is discourse—has always made it hard to deal with either context or a notion of ‘the real’” (51), his plan is actually to expand the notion of what discourse is to include the body and bodily performances as part of language acts.  He seems to be indicating that if we are willing to extend our idea of discourse to other modalities (ie performative acts like the way one walks at a hip-hop show or tags a wall) then those critiques of the linguistic turn fall away because everything is folded into a new idea of the discursive. This is an interesting way out of the bind in some sense. However, it seems too easy, to neat of a solution to me.  For instance, how does this “somatic turn” better account for the physical realities of people with disabilities? I’m not saying that discursive transmodality is not a viable and interesting idea, I just don’t think it actually addresses many of the concerns of those questioning the linguistic turn.

Hello

Hi, this is Meg from the Linguistic Sem.