Abstract
Hip hop has been one of the most influential global forms of popular culture among youth during the past two decades (Bucholtz 2011), and it has received increasing attention in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and educational studies. The studies of critical hip hop (language) pedagogies, in particular, has focused on hip hop as a means of drawing out-of-school experiences of language closer to classroom pedagogy and curriculum (Hill 2009; Alim, Ibrahim and Pennycook 2009; Alim 2011). These frameworks often emphasise creative, limitless and counter-hegemonic linguistic practices as a significant part of the pedagogical and political potentials of hip hop culture. In this chapter we focus on the way hip hop practices are appropriated by a group of adolescents in positioning themselves as educationally ambitious. We investigate what local meanings these practices achieve and their relations to wider semiotic models and norms to discuss the interplay between education, activities, and popular cultural resources. Against the background of previous hip hop research, the case study we report from involved some surprising discoveries. The boys we studied formed a rap-group and engaged in various local hip hop events and initiatives led by different mentors. They were certainly creative in enacting streetwise and school-positive personae, but their hip hop literacy and linguistic practices fell short of challenging hegemonic educational norms.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
A. Agha (2003) ‘The social life of cultural value’, Language & Communication 23, 231–273.
A. Agha (2007) Language and Social Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
A. Agha and S. Wortham (eds) (2005) ‘Discourse across speech-events: intertextuality and interdiscursivity in social life’, Special issue of Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15/1.
H. S. Alim (2011) ‘Global ill-literacies: hip hop cultures, youth identities and the politics of literacy’, Review of Research in Education 35, 120–147.
H. S. Alim, A. Ibrahim and A. Pennycook (2009) Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities and the Politics of Language (London: Routledge).
S.C. Andersen (2010) Mehmet og Modkulturen: En undersøgelse af drenge med etnisk minoritetsbaggrund (Copenhagen: Rambøll Management Consulting).
A. Appadurai (2004) ‘The capacity to aspire: culture and the terms of recognition’ in V. Rao and M. Walton (eds) Culture and Public Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 59–84.
J. Blommaert (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
J. Blommaert, J. Collins and S. Slembrouck (2005) ‘Polycentricity and interactional regimes in “global neighborhoods”’, Ethnography 6(2), 205–235.
P. Bourdieu and J.-C. Passeron (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage Publications).
H. E. Bruce and B. D. Davis (2000) ‘Slam: Hip-hop meets poetry — A strategy for violence intervention’, The English Journal 89(5), 119–127.
M. Bucholtz (2011) White Kids: Language, Race and Styles of Youth Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
P. Cowan (2005) ‘Putting it out there: revealing Latino visual discourse in the Hispanic academic program’ in B. Street (ed.) Literacies across Educational Contexts: Mediating Learning and Teaching (Philadelphia: Caslon Publishing), pp. 145–169.
A. Creese and A. Blackledge (2011) ‘Separate and flexible bilingualism in complementary schools: Multiple language practices in interrelationship’, Journal of Pragmatics 43, 1196–1208.
G. Dimitriadis (2001) Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip-hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice (New York: Peter Lang).
A.H. Dyson (1997) Writing Superheroes: Contemporary Childhood, Popular Culture, and Classroom Literacy (N.Y. and London: Teachers’ College Press).
N. Egelund, C.P. Nielsen and B.S. Rangvid 2011 PISA Etnisk (2009). Etniske og danske unges resultater i PISA 2009. http://www.akf.dk/udgivelser/container/2011/ udgivelse_1041/; accessed 06–07–11.
C. Fast (2007) Sju barn lär sig läse och skriva: Familjeliv och populärkultur i möte med förskola och skola (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppasala Studies in Education 115. Uppsala: Uppsala Universität).
S. Fedorak (2009) Pop Culture: The Culture of Everyday Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
J. Gumperz (1982) Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
K. Gutierrez, B. Rymes and J. Larson (1995) ‘Script, counterscript, and underlife in the classroom — James Brown versus Brown v. Board of Education’, Harvard Educational Review 65(3), 445–471.
S. Hall (1985) ‘Popular culture as a factor of international understanding: the case of reggae’; public lecture; accessed at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0006/000650/065008eb.pdf
L. Harklau and J. Zuengler (2004) ‘Introduction to proposed special issue: Popular culture and classroom language learning’, Linguistics and Education 14, 227–230.
D. Hebdige (2006) ‘Reggae, Rastas and Rudies’ in S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds) Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain (London: Routledge), pp. 113–130.
M. L. Hill (2009) Beats, Rhymes and Classroom Life: Hip Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity (New York: Teachers College Press).
A. Ibrahim (1999) ‘Becoming Black: Rap and hip-hop, race gender, identity and the politics of ESL learning’, TESOL Quarterly 15(3), 349–369.
J. Jaspers (2005) ‘Linguistic sabotage in a context of monolingualism and standardization’, Language and Communication 25, 279–297.
M. S. Karrebæk (2012) ‘Authority relations: the mono-cultural educational agenda and classrooms characterized by diversity’, Naldic Quarterly 10(1).
D. Kulick and B.B. Schieffelin (2004) ‘Language socialization’ in A. Duranti (ed.) A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (Oxford: Blackwell), 349–368.
A. Lefstein and J. Snell (2011) ‘Promises and problems of teaching with popular culture: a linguistic ethnographic analysis of discourse genre mixing in a literacy classroom’, Reading Research Quarterly 46(1), 40–69.
L. M. Madsen (2011) ‘Interactional renegotiations of educational discourses in recreational learning contexts’, Linguistics and Education 22(1), 53–68.
L. M. Madsen (2012) ‘Discourses on integration and interaction in a martial arts club’. In M. Theeboom, B. Vanreusel, C. Timmerman and B. Segaert (eds) Sports, Stakeholder in Society? Sports Community Building and Corporate Social Responsibility (Oxford: Routledge), pp. 74–88.
L. M. Madsen (2013) ‘“High” and “low” in urban Danish speech styles’, Language in Society 42, 1–24.
L. M. Madsen, M.S. Karrebæk and J.S. Møller (2013.) ‘The Amager Project’. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies.
C. McCarthy, M. D. Giardina, S. J. Harewood, J. K. Parket (2003) ‘Afterword: Contesting Culture: Identity and curriculum dilemmas in the age of globalization, postcolonialism and multiplicity’, Harvard Educational Review 73 (3), 449–465.
J. S. Møller and J. N. Jørgensen (2011) ‘Enregisterment among adolescents in superdiverse Copenhagen’ in J. S. Møller and J. N. Jørgensen (eds) Language, Enregisterment and Attitudes (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen), pp. 99–122.
E. Ochs (1992) ‘Indexing gender’ in A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 335–358.
OECD (2006) Where Immigrant Students Succeed — A Comparative Review of Performance and Engagement in PISA 2003 (Paris: OECD Programme for International Student Assessment).
A. Pennycook (2005) ‘Teaching with the flow: fixity and fluidity in education’, Asia Pacifi c Journal of Education 25(1), 29–43.
A. Pennycook (2007) Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (Abingdon: Routledge).
B. Rampton (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents (London: Longman).
B. Rampton (2006) Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
B. Rymes (2004) ‘Contrasting zones of comfortable competence: popular culture in a phonics lesson’, Linguistics and Education 14, 321–335.
B.B. Schieffelin and E. Ochs, (eds) (1986) Language Socialization across Cultures (New York: Cambridge University Press).
M. Silverstein (1998) ‘Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities’, Annual Review of Anthropology 27, 401–26.
M. Silverstein (2003) ‘Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life’, Language & Communication 23, 193–229.
A. Stæhr (2010) Rappen reddede os. Et studie af senmoderne storbydrenges identitetsarbejde i fritids- og skolemiljøer (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen).
A. Stæhr and L. M. Madsen (2015) ‘Standard language in urban rap — Social media, linguistic practice and ethnographic context’, Language and Communication 40, 67–81.
H. Vigh (2008) ‘Crisis and chronicity: anthropological perspectives on continuous conflict and decline’, Ethnos 73(1), 5–24.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Lian Malai Madsen and Martha Sif Karrebæk
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Madsen, L.M., Karrebæk, M.S. (2015). Hip Hop, Education and Polycentricity. In: Snell, J., Shaw, S., Copland, F. (eds) Linguistic Ethnography. Palgrave Advances in Language and Linguistics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035035_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035035_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-52906-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-03503-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social Sciences CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)