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English Journal 105.4 (2016): 43–48

Alison g. Dover and Tony Pozdol

Teaching Good Kids in a m.A.A.d World: Using Hip-Hop to Reflect, Reframe, and Respond to Complex Realities

In this article, the authors examine how one of the authors used Kendrick Lamar’s autobiographical hip-hop to provoke mandate-compliant analyses of complex social, racial, and political realities.

teacher to center racial justice through their se-lection of texts, students rarely made connections between the analysis of literature and that of con-temporary events. There was a clear difference be-tween students’ perception of what matters and what matters in English class.

During his 16 weeks in the classroom, Tony was required to meet a broad array of mandates, including the Common Core State Standards, de-partmental learning goals and timelines, and university- based student teaching expectations. He also had to prepare students for district- level diag-nostic exams, and— in response to an abrupt change in policy— put aside his planned curriculum to focus on PARCC, which would ultimately monopolize two full weeks of class time. Three months before his student teaching began, Tony learned he would have to participate in a pilot test for a new, state- mandated high- stakes teacher performance assess-ment (edTPA). This assessment required him to submit three to five lesson plans, a 20- minute video clip, student work samples, and approximately 25 pages of narrative for scoring by an anonymous ex-ternal evaluator. While edTPA is a new requirement in Illinois, candidates in other states suggest it un-dermines the authenticity of their teaching by pres-suring them to teach what they think test developers want rather than what their own students need (Au).

t’s a complicated time to be a teacher. We, and our students, are required to comply with a growing number of “accountability mea-

sures,” ranging from reductive standardized as-sessments to scripted curriculum. These mandates steal time from our classrooms and undermine our attempts to develop and implement curriculum that reflects the unique academic, cultural, and situational needs of our students. Thus, as justice- oriented English language arts teachers, we face a dilemma: How can we reconcile our vision with the demands of teaching in an increasingly regulated school system?

This is the question that Tony, one of the au-thors of this article, grappled with as he prepared to enter the classroom. Tony is white, a hip- hop art-ist, and a graduate of the predominantly black and Latino/Latina urban district where he now teaches. The surrounding city is known for intense racial segregation, inequity, and violence, but also vibrant justice- oriented and youth- led social, political, and artistic activism. Tony began student teaching in the months following the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and his seventh and eighth graders walked the hallways talking about violence, policing, and protest. However, despite attempts by Tony and his veteran, African American mentor

This is it, man. Nobody heard this story and if you heard it, you heard it in bits and pieces but I’m finna put it to you in a whole album—from Compton, from the hood, from the streets—it’s a whole other perspective and light.

—Kendrick Lamar, “Writer at War”

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Teaching good Kids in a m.A.A.d World: using Hip-Hop to reflect, reframe, and respond to Complex realities

44 March 2016

However, Tony had previous experience de-signing justice- oriented curriculum, a supportive mentor teacher, and a university supervisor (Ali-son, the other author of this article) who is a vocal advocate of teaching for social justice. He also ap-proached the classroom with insider status: as a community member, a local hip- hop artist, and a recent graduate of the district. In an early semester journal entry, he reflected on his desire to take cur-ricular risks, despite intense pressure to conform:

I want to take chances. I want to take that which I’ve built from scratch, what I’ve put my own cre-ative energy into, and give it a go. After all, this is work that I believe in [but] . . . I can’t get out of the headspace that reminds me that I’m being constantly watched. This nagging feeling that everything I do, from where I take discussions during lessons, to not telling the students to be more quiet in the halls, is being analyzed. (Tony’s journal)

In this article, we present the unit Tony sub-mitted for his edTPA portfolio, one where he risked using his students’— and his own— dominant lan-

guage (that of hip- hop) to provoke mandate- compliant analyses of pressing social is-sues. By using contemporary, contextually resonant nonfic-tion, and specifically the auto-biographical, situated songs of Kendrick Lamar, Tony created opportunities for students to interrogate the complexities of race, identity, and the dom-inant narrative. This unit also

offers a compelling example of “critical compli-ance” (Gorlewski, “Accountable”) as a strategy for resisting dominant discourses in schools and soci-ety, including those seeking to undermine teacher agency and autonomy (Gorlewski, Power 63).

From Hip- Hop Artist to english Teacher and Back Again

From 13 years old to the time I was 21, I was in a mode of mastering how to be a rapper. Like a rapper’s rapper, using my tongue as a sword. . . .

That’s all it was about, slaying words. So when I turned 21, 22 . . . that’s when I started developing and actually constructing my music from a writ-er’s point of view. good kid, m.A.A.d city was prob-ably one of them albums that you could unfold out into a book and read it. And that’s how I treat everything. Everything is critical like that from here on out. It’s the art of writing.

— Kendrick Lamar, “Writer at War”

Like many artists, Tony fell in love with hip- hop as a teenager. Inspired by the linguistic intrica-cies of Eminem and Nas and the original hip- hop of his peers, Tony recorded his first song as a high school senior. He went on to college but priori-tized freestyle cyphers with friends and late- night writing sessions over coursework, and he eventu-ally dropped out. He later formed a hip- hop fusion band, St. Bagu, that garnered local and regional attention. His band was ultimately one of several selected to represent the Chicago hip- hop scene at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, China. He has performed throughout the region, most nota-bly opening for The Roots (an internationally re-nowned hip- hop band) at a major local venue. Tony currently writes and performs for the group Paper.Beats.Rock and is in the process of writing his first solo album.

When Tony returned to college to get his English credential, he looked for ways to bring hip- hop into the classroom. For him, it’s an intui-tive pairing: in addition to validating the authen-tic, culturally resonant language of young people, hip- hop entices listeners to think beyond the text, challenging them to make meaning of complex allusions, insider references, and historical con-texts. Hip- hop is both geographically specific and thematically broad, requiring students to make connections to their lives while simultaneously un-packing nuanced details of each artist’s experience. Moreover, as a genre that foregrounds the perspec-tives of artists of color, and frequently young artists of color, hip- hop creates opportunities to inter-rupt the overwhelming whiteness of language arts curriculum (Schieble 158). By emphasizing non- dominant narratives and the cultivation of critical consciousness (Morrell and Duncan- Andrade 89), hip- hop pedagogy requires listeners to grapple

Hip-hop is both

geographically specific

and thematically broad,

requiring students

to make connections

to their lives while

simultaneously unpacking

nuanced details of each

artist’s experience.

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45English Journal

Alison g. Dover and Tony Pozdol

with key questions of identity and voice, such as those posed by Groenke et al.: “What are stories people tell about adolescents? Who writes these stories? Who benefits? Who is silenced? Who is harmed?” (38).

Tony’s fluency in hip- hop also prepared him to negotiate some of the genre’s challenges. Hip- hop lyrics often depict violence, misogyny, and con-sumerism; to teach it effectively requires teachers to acknowledge and navigate these themes (Stovall 589). This wasn’t always easy: despite Tony’s efforts to select developmentally appropriate songs, his handouts were full of black lines of censored lyr-ics that reflect the complexities of using authentic texts in the classroom. However, by balancing the recognition of “not- safe- for- school” lyrics with an analysis of Lamar’s sophisticated vocabulary, use of figurative language, and narrative technique, Tony used this seeming contradiction to challenge stu-dents’ preconceived notions of what constitutes “ac-ademic text.”

Identity, Context, and Kendrick Lamar

Like most great lessons, this unit evolved in re-sponse to an instructional dilemma. Tony’s students

were finishing People Wasn’t Made to Burn, Joe Allen’s account of racial discrimination in mid- century Chicago. Their final assessment required panels of students to define justice and determine whether it had been served in different situa-tions in the text. In between presentations, a stu-dent brought up the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner as contemporary examples of ra-cial injustice, but other students challenged the characterization of their deaths as illustrative of a pattern.

I was surprised to find that many other students had trouble connecting our discussion of systemic racism to the injustice at hand. They understood the killing of unarmed kids was a problem, but they didn’t quite connect it to our long history of racism in America. It was essentially an isolated incident to them.

So when we transitioned to A Raisin in the Sun, I assigned groups of students the task of developing character sketches for each character. I was thinking, People Wasn’t Made to Burn told the facts of race related housing discrimination well, but A Raisin in the Sun would show them. However, as the students analyzed the character of Walter Lee Younger and concluded that he was simply “greedy” without examining the systemic issues that influenced his decisions, it became clear to me that they were struggling to grapple with the contextual factors that affect who people are and become. It was as if they thought iden-tity, too, was a sort of isolated incident. (Tony’s journal)

So, Tony saw his opportunity to use hip- hop— in this case, Kendrick Lamar’s audio autobi-ography Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City— to help students grapple with the implications of context, both in literature and their own lives. In Good Kid, Lamar uses nonlinear storytelling techniques to depict the persistent tensions he faced while growing up in a community affected by gang wars, fatherlessness, widespread police brutality, and substance abuse.

Tony’s Lamar unit explored the idea of “be-coming” in a complicated personal, racial, and political climate: themes central to the album, the texts students read earlier in the year, and his students’ lives. He highlighted three loosely

Tony, performing at a youth event in Chicago, Illinois. Photo by Selina Marie Photography.

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Teaching good Kids in a m.A.A.d World: using Hip-Hop to reflect, reframe, and respond to Complex realities

46 March 2016

progressive tracks (Figure 1), tracing Lamar’s evo-lution from an adolescent who reacts to peer and community pressures to a young adult able to love himself and be “real.” In “Art of Peer Pressure,” Lamar describes himself as both a peacemaker and a participant in criminal activity, requiring listeners to make sense of conflicting representations of self. “Good Kid” invites listeners to evaluate the subjec-tive and situated nature of being “good,” especially in the context of community strife. The final song in this sequence, “Real,” represents Lamar’s reso-lution of his experiences. In it, Lamar empathizes with his former self, reconnects with his parents, and begins to use his story to help other young

people, inviting listeners to “sing my song, it’s all for you” (“Real,” Bridge).

As a white hip- hop artist teaching about race in a community of color, Tony knew he was navi-gating complicated waters. ELA teachers often use hip- hop to scaffold students’ analysis of canonized literary texts (Kelly 51), but that carries the risk of reinforcing the appropriation and marginaliza-tion of the voices of people of color. Tony wanted to avoid diluting the power of hip- hop’s social com-mentary by positioning it as a supplemental, or springboard, text (Kelly 51– 52), while simultane-ously helping students see their fluency in hip- hop as “academic knowledge” in itself.

Thus, he kept his central focus on Lamar’s work, using outside texts to situate Lamar’s lyrics and connect gaps in students’ background knowl-edge. Early in the unit, for example, Tony screened Crips to provide an external reference point for dis-cussions of gangs, then referred back to it when students missed Lamar’s paradoxical symbolism in “Good Kid,” where “red and blue” represent both gang colors and police strobe lights. Tony also explic-itly treated Lamar’s lyrics as academic texts, guiding students in applying previously taught literacy skills (highlighting, annotation, etc.) to their reading of hip- hop. See Figure 2 for examples of lessons Tony used to support unit goals related to the relationship among identity, perception, and context; explicit and inferential reading; and students’ analysis of hip- hop’s literary, syntactic, and thematic depth.

Tony’s summative assessment required stu-dents to make an evidence- based analysis of how Lamar’s context informed his identity, using lyrics to support their claims. They then extended their analysis to their own lives by making a personal “identity claim” and explaining how it reflected their context. This allowed students to demonstrate that they met overarching unit goals, while also using hip- hop’s relatability to deepen students’ un-derstanding of themselves.

reflections on Complex realities: Learnings and Next Steps

Teaching this unit was a critical point in Tony’s de-velopment as a teacher: it enabled him to integrate his personal and professional passions with the de-mands of teaching in a heavily regulated context. He was supported by his colleagues and gained

FIgure 1. Unit Elements and Resources

essential Questions:What is identity? What do we do to mark identity?How does context both shape and reflect identity?

Literary terms and concepts: figurative language, abstract nouns, paradox, mood, theme, connotative and denotative meaning, explicit and inferential reading

Focal Standards: CCSS.ELA- LITERACY.CCRA.R.1:Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific tex-tual evidence when writing or speaking to support con-clusions drawn from the text.

CCSS.ELA- LITERACY.CCRA.R.4:Interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figu-rative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.

CCSS.ELA- LITERACY.CCRA.R.8:Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence.

Central texts: Kendrick Lamar’s songs: “The Art of Peer Pressure,” “Good Kid,” “Real”

Supplemental Texts: Crips and Bloods: Made in America (documentary) Fruitvale Station (film)“Kendrick Lamar Talks Not Smoking Weed, Tupac, Compton, K. Dot” (interview with Kendrick Lamar)“Growing Up in Compton” (interview with Kendrick Lamar)“Kendrick Lamar on His New Album and the Weight of Clarity” (newspaper article)

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47English Journal

Alison g. Dover and Tony Pozdol

confidence in his authority as an early- career teacher. He used this unit to articulate his educational phi-losophy during job interviews and was ultimately offered a position teaching English language arts in the community where he student taught. These are the sorts of experiences that sustain justice- oriented teachers throughout their careers, as they learn to seek solidarity, artfully interweave social justice and standards, and balance critical compliance with re-flective resistance (Gorlewski, “Accountable”; Dover 94; Picower 1129).

Tony’s students were excited about and en-gaged by the unit, both overall and as a validation of hip- hop as something worth studying. Many em-barked on unassigned, out- of- school research into Lamar’s life or suggested additional songs for anal-ysis; one student even focused her final assessment on other, unstudied, tracks. Students knew Lamar’s lyrics and were intimately acquainted with the

contentious relationship between people of color and police. They saw themselves in Lamar and were able to shift fluidly between close reading of his lyrics and broader analysis. While some of this was surely due to the nature of the genre, which uses storytelling to elicit responses from listeners (Kelly 54), it also re-flected students’ increasing ability to “read the word and the world” (Freire and Macedo).

The relevance and accessibility of hip- hop also led students to consider how the lyrics might represent— and re- present— their own contextual re-alities. In the words of one student, “I already liked the music, but didn’t realize there was so much depth there.” Another student likened his father’s experi-ence growing up in their local community to Lamar’s experience in Compton, saying that in both cases “the [gang] life chooses you.” This student connected Lamar’s claim that he was “all for you [other young people of color]” (“Real”) to the student’s father’s at-tempt to help his son learn from his own childhood mistakes. Students also related to the events depicted in supplemental texts. After watching Fruitvale Sta-tion, a dramatization of the last day of Oscar Grant’s life prior to his murder by police, several students were moved to tears, noting that “that could have been me, that could have been my friends.”

While this unit was clearly effective at chal-lenging dominant constructions of “complex liter-ature,” it wasn’t perfect. Despite students’ nuanced ability to cite rhetorical and practical factors that influenced Lamar’s depiction of self, their final as-sessments revealed that some still struggled to articulate the impact of their own context. In the words of one student, “I am confused. There is a lot of things that I do not understand in this crazy world . . . I just don’t understand things that I be-lieve or why I believe them.” Tony reflected on this in his final journal entry of the year:

I suppose it would have been naïve of me to expect everything to turn out exactly as I had planned and hoped it would. I mean, it’s teaching, and I’m a beginning teacher at that. The classroom can be unpredictable . . . it’s made up of human beings who are complex, and that very human complexity is exactly what I wanted them to see in their study of these songs by Kendrick Lamar. That is, people shouldn’t be reduced to bullet points and snap judg-ments. And so when one of my students is asked to evaluate not only Kendrick Lamar, but himself at the end of this unit, and responds with the identity

FIgure 2. Exemplary Lessons

Key Concept: understanding Context• Introduction:Screen“GrowingupinCompton.”• Discussionquestions:WhatdoesKendricksayComp-

ton was like growing up? How might growing up in Compton affect someone psychologically or emo-tionally? What elements of Compton are reflected in Lamar’s songs?

• Nextsteps:Introduce“TheArtofPeerPressure,”looking for evidence of context (“pressures”) reflected in the lyrics.

Key Concept: explicit and Inferential Identity Claims• Introduction:Guidestudentsinaclosereadingof

“The Art of Peer Pressure,” focusing on the explicit identity claims throughout the song (e.g., “I’m a sober soul,” “I’m a peacemaker”) as well as Lamar’s actions (carrying a gun, drinking and driving).

• Discussionquestions:Whatistherelationshipbetween Lamar’s identity claims and students’ inter-pretation of his actions? What can students infer based upon this relationship?

• Nextsteps:IndependentanalysisofidentityclaimsinLamar’s lyrics.

Key Concept: Abstract Nouns and Subjectivity• Introduction:Presentcontemporarysymbols(e.g.,

President Obama, controversial pop star Iggy Azalea, the American flag, LeBron James) and ask students to decide whether or not they represent something “good.”

• Bridgetodiscussionofculturalandcontextualsub-jectivity of abstract nouns.

• Nextsteps:Introduce“GoodKid,”focusingontheanalysis of lyrical evidence related to Lamar’s charac-terization of himself as a “good kid.”

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claim, “I’m confused,” I’m not discouraged. Part of me wants to just tell him, “me too!” Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for him to respond with a definitive and proud affirmation of self, that’s been informed by a thorough breakthrough in his analysis of how context shaped that, but maybe there’s just still a ton of complexity left to sift through.

At the end of the day, I’m encouraged by the fact that students are engaged in that kind of sifting through. It should remind them that they’re import-ant, that they’re worth the study, and that the real world they live in is the same one their classroom exists within. The classroom shouldn’t exist in isola-tion. The classroom itself should be informed by its context. What community is it a part of? That com-munity should be represented. What kind of people make up that community? Those kinds of people should be represented. (Tony’s journal)

In today’s mandate- driven schools, the loudest voices rarely emerge from the classroom. However, by find-ing ways to affirm the authentic voices of students— and teachers— we have the opportunity to critically examine the narratives that shape our reality.

Works Cited

Au, Wayne. “What’s a Nice Test Like You Doing in a Place Like This? The edTPA and Corporate Education ‘Reform.’” Rethinking Schools 27.4. (2013). Web.

Coscarelli, Joe. “Kendrick Lamar on His New Album and the Weight of Clarity.” New York Times. (16 March 2015). Web.

Crips and Bloods: Made in America. Dir. Stacy Peralta. Gang Documentary, 2008. DVD.

Dover, Alison. “Getting ‘Up to Code’: Preparing for and Confronting Challenges When Teaching for Social Justice in Standards- Based Classrooms.” Action in Teacher Education 35.2 (2013): 89– 102. Print.

Freire, Paulo, and Donaldo Macedo. Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Westport: Bergin, 1987. Print.

Fruitvale Station. Dir. Ryan Coogler. Forest Whitaker, 2013. DVD.

Gorlewski, Julie. “Accountable to Whom? Normalizing Culturally Sustainable Assessment.” American Edu-cational Research Association Annual Meeting, Chi-cago, IL. 2015. Paper presentation.

— — — . Power, Resistance, and Literacy: Writing for Social Jus-tice. Charlotte: Information Age, 2011. Print.

Groenke, Susan L., et al. “Disrupting and Dismantling the Dominant Vision of Youth of Color.” English Journal 104.3 (2015): 35– 40. Print.

Grow, Kory. “Kendrick Lamar Named ‘Generational Icon’ by California Senate.” Rolling Stone (May 12, 2015). Web.

“Growing Up in Compton.” Online video clip. YouTube. 9 August 2012. Web.

Hardknocktv. “Kendrick Lamar Talks Not Smoking Weed, Tupac, Compton, K. Dot.” Online video clip. You-Tube. 9 June 2011. Web.

Karp, Stan. “The Problems with the Common Core.” Rethinking Schools 28.2 (2013– 14). Web.

Kelly, Lauren Leigh. “Hip- Hop Literature: The Politics, Poetics and Power of Hip- Hop in the English Class-room.” English Journal 102.5 (2013): 51– 56. Print.

Lamar, Kendrick. Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. Top Dawg Entertainment, Aftermath Entertainment, 2012. CD.

Lamar, Kendrick. “Writer at War.” XXL Magazine (6 Jan. 2015). Web.

Morrell, Ernest, and Jeff Duncan- Andrade. “Toward a Criti-cal Classroom Discourse: Promoting Academic Liter-acy through Engaging Hip- Hop Culture with Urban Youth.” English Journal 91.6 (2002): 88– 94. Print.

Picower, Bree. “Resisting Compliance: Learning to Teach for Social Justice in a Neoliberal Context.” Teachers College Record 113.5 (2011): 1105– 134. Print.

Schieble, Melissa. “Reframing Equity under the Common Core: A Commentary on the Text Exemplar List for Grades 9– 12.” English Teaching: Practice and Critique 13.1 (2014): 155– 68. Web.

Stovall, David. “We Can Relate: Hip- Hop Culture, Critical Pedagogy, and the Secondary Classroom.” Urban Education 41.6 (2006): 585– 602. Print.

Alison g. Dover (a- dover@neiu.edu) is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Inquiry and Curriculum Stud-ies at Northeastern Illinois University. A former urban English language arts teacher (and NCTE member since 2006), her research examines approaches to enacting justice in the context of accountability- driven P– 12 and teacher education. Tony Pozdol (tony.pozdol@gmail.com) recently earned his BA in Secondary English Education at Northeastern Illinois Univer-sity. Tony has 14 years of experience as a hip- hop artist and is in his first year as an English language arts teacher in his home-town of Chicago, Illinois.

reADWrITeTHINK CONNeCTION Lisa Storm Fink, rWT

This lesson begins by playing the chorus of rapper Kanye West’s “Diamonds from Sierra Leone.” Protest songs serve as a means to combat social ills and cover a wide array of topics, including racism, sexism, poverty, imperial-ism, environmental degradation, war, and homophobia. This lesson makes a connection to popular culture by ask-ing students to work in pairs to research and analyze contemporary and historic protest songs. After learning about wikis, each pair posts their analysis of the protest songs to a class wiki, adding graphics, photos, and hyperlinks as desired. The class then works together to organize the entries. Finally, students listen to all of the protest songs and add information and comments to each other’s pages. http://bit.ly/dpibg5

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