Hip Hop megastars blend with Blake and Beowulf in FE classrooms in Sheffield

Engaging young people in Skills for Life courses is a challenge faced by organisations across the country. To address this problem, tutors at Sheffield College have developed an innovative course based on popular culture. Here Julie Hooper describes the impact of the Rap/Poetry unit of the course.

Young People Speak Out is a Skills for Life curriculum developed by the tutors at Sheffield College with the support of the School of Education at Sheffield University via the NRDC's Practitioner-Led Research Initiative.

The curriculum is built around issues of youth and popular culture and is designed to encourage 16-19 year olds with below grade D in GCSE English to continue with literacy and language skills using ILT.

The themes are all mapped to both the Core Curriculum standards and the GCSE English descriptors; students work towards the national tests but grade C at GCSE English remains a longer-term goal for some.

Students are particularly motivated by the theme in our Rap/ Poetry unit that teaches language and basic literacy by exploring Hip Hop lyrics and culture.

Hip Hop in Sheffield

Hip Hop has a prestigious place in the hearts of educators in Sheffield. Last March, The College, Sheffield LEA and Sheffield University joined forces to put teenage Hip Hop rappers from the USA onstage in Sheffield with local rappers in Sheffield's theatres. Their performance was a celebration of the creative talents of young people with a passion for creating Hip Hop rhymes and rhythms. It was also a recognition that Hip Hop is more than a multi million dollar industry that glamorises violence and materialism; it is a form of lyrical composition that requires verbal dexterity and mastery of language.

Competitiveness with words feature in rap music and the skills of 'freewheeling'where young people verbally spar to see who is the quickest, the slickest, the most entertaining user of words is part of the cultural capital of many young students in our colleges.

The Rap/Poetry unit

We wrote the Rap/ Poetry unit of the 'Young People Speak Out' curriculum to take advantage of the high status rap music has with young people.

Hip Hop lyrics are used to teach stylistic features; imagery, assonance, alliteration, rhythmic structure and rhyme are taught while basic literacy (vowels, consonants, blends, syllables and spelling) is embedded.

Students also apply the language techniques to their own writing. The curriculum is available both online and on paper in the form of student workbooks which capture the design elements of teenage magazines.

The lyrics of global giants such as Eminem and African American rapper, Nas, are juxtaposed with poetry from the literary canon such as William Blake's 'Infant Sorrow'. Ideas in Eminem are traced back to the classical tradition, for example the story of Atlas. Features of rap are compared with features found in Beowulf.

Seamus Heaney on Eminem

The unit begins with the study of a newspaper interview with poet Seamus Heaney who extols the verbal skills of rap artiste, Eminem. When asked if there was an artiste today who informed young people's thinking about lyrics in the way that Bob Dylan and John Lennon did in the sixties and seventies Heaney answered:

There is this guy Eminem.He has created a sense of what is possible.He has sent a voltage around a generation. He has done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy.

We focus on the language Heaney uses to describe Eminem then introduce the work of black American rapper, Nas. Following a series of international chart hits, Nas is also part of mainstream popular culture.

We study the lyrics of a less well-known piece called 'Fetus' (sic). Nas imagines himself in the womb, waiting, preparing for birth, commenting upon his family and society .

Nas and William Blake

We then make thematic connections between 'Fetus' and William Blake's 'Infant Sorrow'. Students recognise that both poets explore the imaginary idea of a baby having a privileged insight into its own birth and the society it's born into; both place the birth in an impoverished urban setting, albeit two hundred years apart.

Similarities and differences between the babies' birth experiences, the parents' reactions to the births and the socio-historical context are discussed.

Stylistic comparisons between the lyrics and the poem lead into discussion about why one gets called a poem and the other a rap. An interesting dimension is that Hip Hop itself claims the words 'rhymes' and 'poems' in its discourse so 'poems' in this context have high status with many young people.

Styles and genres

We then introduce an informative text about the history and styles of rap music. Our main purpose is to teach the concept of genre through discussion of the different genres found in rap, particularly Party rap, Message rap, News rap, Boast rap and Gangsta rap.

Students get to identify the genre in lyrics by American rapper E Attack called 'Partytime'. Interesting discussions can happen about the music industry's exploitation of gangsta imagery ; students acknowledge thinking that 'gangsta and 'bling' was all that Hip Hop was about.

Next the Rap/Poetry unit explores the 'boast' genre through 'Partytime', where E Attack 'boasts' about his verbal skills. 'Boasting' and exaggerating are presented as a stylistic convention in literature and oracy that has ancient and cross-cultural roots ; translated extracts of Beowulf are used for comparison. Beowulf boasts that he can kill the monster Grendel single- handed, where whole armies have failed.

The unit then moves on to Message Rap. In Nas's international chart hit, 'I Can' he has the following message for young men about literacy:

Young boys, you can use a lot of help, you know
You thinkin' life's all about smokin' weed and ice
You don't wanna be my age and can't read and write
Begging different women for a place to sleep at night

The lyrics of Eminem

The Rap/Poetry unit now builds upon the language features it introduced earlier, through a study of Eminem lyrics. In 'Sing for the Moment' from the 'Eminem Show', Eminem describes the reaction that some American parents have when they discover their sons listening to his music.

These ideas are nightmares for white parents
Whose worst fear is a child with dyed hair and who likes earrings
Like whatever they say has no bearing
It's so scary in a house that allows no swearing
To see him walking around with his headphones blaring
Alone in his own zone, cold and he don't care

We use the text to stimulate discussion about adult perceptions of youth culture. The extract is excellent for demonstrating sound effects in language, especially assonance. We also used this text to introduce a substantial section on the different spellings of vowel sounds. Imagery is later introduced through Eminem's words:

And I just know that I grow colder the older I grow.
This boulder on my shoulder gets heavy and harder to hold,
and this load is like the weight of the world,
and I think my neck is breaking

For centuries, western poets have found inspiration in the classical tradition; our students are given the story of Atlas and contemplate whether or not Eminem is consciously drawing inspiration from the myth.

Although teachers encourage students to write creatively in rap form whenever the opportunity arises, the Rap/ Poetry unit concludes with an exercise that gets the students writing rap in a genre of their choice and including stylistic techniques they have learned - imagery assonance, etc.

Conclusion

Did the unit engage young people and help them develop language and skills? This is partly what the NRDC Practitioner Research will help us find out and we will be able to share our results at the PLRI event in London on 7 December, 2004.

Julie Hooper can be contacted at julie.hooper@sheffcol.ac.uk

The Sheffield team would love to hear from fellow practitioners who try out some of these ideas or who would be interested in either a fuller description of the language and literacy activities used or the way that ILT is used to engage young students in literacy.

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