Hip Hop to Shakespeare, A new way of Teaching

Hip-Hop to Shakespeare, a new way of teaching
By Patrick T. Cliff

After Schuaib Meacham finished reeling off a hip-hop song he wrote, a middle-school student stood up in the back of the classroom. She analyzed Meacham's song in a way that surprised everyone, especially her teacher. The girl was flunking English, but all of the sudden she was picking apart a song as if it were a poem. That was the plan.

She "analyzed it better than I would expect any of my college students to," said Meacham, 42, a professor of education at the University of Delaware who was a guest teacher that day.

Meacham is part of a growing movement in education that is trying to bring hip-hop into the classroom as a way to engage students. Teachers encourage students to bring their favorite hip-hop songs to class, which, Meacham said, has become a way to empower the students. Much of the effort has been in literacy, but teachers are also using hip-hop to teach filmmaking, science and creative writing. The biggest shift, though, has been understanding hip-hop lyrics as literature.

At the invitation of the Sheffield education council, Meacham and a group of students visited England last year. The council was interested in trying to engage its students, many of who, like their counterparts in the United States, had no interest in William Blake or William Shakespeare. Meacham encouraged the teachers and students to listen to hip-hop for classic literary devices like iambic pentameter and metaphor.

"England has a very traditional literary canon," Meacham said. So he was all the more stunned when the teachers and administrators there began to embrace this new literature.

William Blake, for example, wrote the poem "Infinite Sorrow" in 1789. A little more than 200 years later, Nas, a hip-hop artist, released the track "Fetus." If Blake's sorrowful poem about his birth is literature, said Meacham, then so is Nas' song. "The kids might not see literary devices in Blake, but they see it in Nas," he said.

"What happened when we went to England, we were stunned," Meacham said. "By the end, you had university administrators talking about the potential of rap, linking the vernacular" to classic literature.

Last November, Meacham attended a conference with 300 educators and hip-hop artists, which was organized by H2Ed -- Hip-Hop Education -- in New York. Until then, teachers had no place to meet and share their ideas about using hip-hop in the classroom, said Tricia Wang, 24, vice president of H2Ed, which is a part of Hip-Hop Association, a New York-based nonprofit founded in 2003. "If you have no way to engage students," said Wang, "teachers are desperate. Teachers are so thankful for this."

If teachers found like minds at the conference, they met with skepticism in the world outside. Both Meacham and Wang have run into resistance, mostly from school administrators. For instance, the title of one of Meacham's classes -- Hip-Hop and Literacy -- was changed without his approval. Administrators in the education department where he teaches thought the title was inappropriate.

Hip-hop artists are also using classic literature in their work. Dead Prez, some of whose members attended the conference, recorded "The Animal in Man," their version of George Orwell's "Animal Farm." Meacham sees the song as an opportunity to teach a classic novel through a contemporary song.

To encourage more collaboration among teachers, H2Ed plans to launch an online database this summer that will have lesson plans from teachers around the world.

Educators using hip-hop are frustrated that people dismiss their approach. "Most people haven't heard the words hip-hop and education together," said Wang, but when they do, "they think of kids doing graffiti over the walls. That's not what's happening."

Meacham acknowledged that putting hip-hop artists on the same level as poets from the canon might surprise, or even disturb some people, but the benefits for students outweigh those concerns.

"In class, hip-hop is a vehicle to help students succeed where previously they've failed," Meacham said. "Without hip-hop, you wouldn't even know what they were capable of."

(((ptc2101@columbia.edu)))