Innovative course helps hip hop into the classroom

On Wall Street, maybe, it’s better to let the game come to you. In other settings, it might be best to go right in after the game.

“The game” in this case is the problem of engaging K-12 students in their own education. It’s been well-documented that many of them, especially students in low-income and/or at-risk groups, feel increasingly alienated from traditional learning. Compounding the problem is the fact that a sizeable and growing number do not use English as their primary language.

A lot of them, though, can and do get behind hip hop, the street poetry of contemporary urban centers around the world. Grassroots in its origins, in its mix are West African griot (a form of musical storytelling), bebop and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, which fused spoken words with music to make personal and social statements.

The appeal of hip hop and spoken word has not been lost on William Ney, executive director of the new Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI) in the School of Education. OMAI houses Youth Speaks-Wisconsin, making OMAI the first university-based spoken-word and urban-arts center in the country.

UW–Madison also is emerging as a leader in putting hip hop to work in school curricula. Ney predicts that the effectiveness of spoken word in the classroom will spread the appeal of hip hop to teachers of teachers across the nation and around the world.

“By better understanding the positive potential of hip hop to engage students through art forms they value and trust, teachers and community organizers will be better equipped to counter high dropout rates and academic underachievement of all students, especially students of color struggling to keep up with their peers,” he says.

Ney performed his first freestyle poem at the National Youth Spoken Word Summit and will have plenty of opportunities to refine his art during the coming months: In October, Youth Speaks-Wisconsin will present a showcase in conjunction with the Wisconsin Book Festival. Youth teams from the Twin Cities, Milwaukee, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Detroit and Madison will perform with such acclaimed professionals as Linton Kwesi Johnson from Britain, Mayda del Valle and Kevin Coval of Chicago, Dasha Kelly and others.

OMAI also will sponsor the seventh annual Cinefest in November, this year dedicated to films dealing with spoken word and to Saul Landau, an internationally known scholar, author, commentator and filmmaker who recently dedicated his film archives to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. During the spring semester Marc Bamuthi Joseph, globally known hip hop theater artist, will spend 10 weeks on campus as the Arts Institute artist-in-residence. In addition, plans currently are under way for a special residence hall at UW–Madison themed around spoken-word culture.

During this past summer, UW–Madison added fuel to its hip-hop fire by virtue of an avant-garde continuing education course for teachers and student services personnel. The university launched the first-of-its-kind-in-the-nation class under the guidance of Paula Wolfe, assistant professor of curriculum and instruction. Wolfe worked with spoken word leader e.g. bailey of Minnesota and Roberto Rivera, director of the locally based Elements of Change.

Both teachers and participants in this course are blazing for spoken word, and nothing will deter them from coming to class. On the day of the Big Rain in Madison, the afternoon in which the city abruptly accumulated five inches of precip in 90 minutes, people started to congregate in Gilbert Hemsley Theatre. People had to ford some new and sandal-drowning rivers and lakes to reach this basement venue. The entirely reasonable expectation was that the theater will have flooded in the deluge. However, Hemsley remained dry as ice, and the folks who already had swum in were eating pizza, and clearly pumped for the performances that were about to begin.

“Welcome to the first annual Spitfire Summer Institute Showcase!” At the mic was Ron Horne, co-director of the Texas Youth Word Collective in Austin. Everybody in Hemsley Theatre clapped and cheered. Some stamped their soggy feet.

“I spent 13 years as a paralegal, doing litigation at a firm specializing in water law. I came to the Word Collective three years ago, and it’s the best work I’ve ever done,” he says later. “It’s interactive learning at its very best.”

Wolfe agrees. “One thing that makes spoken word so powerful is that it is profoundly social. Rather than writing in isolation, students are encouraged to share their work — students see the power of their words through the effect on an audience. Students are able to see that what they do can have profound effects,” she says.

Her class this summer also saw firsthand the impact they are capable of making. Robin Weindruch, for more than 20 years a teacher of literacy at Madison’s Sennett Middle School, says her own classes this fall will be infused with freshness sprung from these hip-hop collaborations.

“We did a lot of exercises that I think will be quite valuable in my classes,” she says. “For example, we worked in teams, with newspapers, piecing together different articles to make a poem. We also did some free associations and collages of literature; I really liked that. I don’t like to write. I’m a visual person, and it’s hard for me to get started.”

However, get started she did, and finished, too, and she presented her original piece in the afternoon’s showcase. Afterwards, Weindruch says she’d like to start a similar workshop for fellow teachers.

If Chris Cummings, an English and creative writing teacher at Middleton High School, were guest-lecturing in Weindruch’s workshop, he would advise participants to think of hip hop as poetry in three dimensions.

“It’s like a hyperlink on the Internet — words and phrases can refer to whole philosophies,” he says.

Cummings (hip-hop alias “Chris C”) has a different take on diversity that makes him a star in the showcase.

“I’m a goofy, middle-class white man.

“I shop at Menards.

“I use my Visa card to gas up my Corolla.

“I help perpetuate The System.

“Damn.”

We cheated here by writing this down. Spoken word is supposed to be ephemeral, Wolfe says. It differs from traditional poetry like play from novel.

“Spoken word is as much about oral performance and rhythm as it is about poetics,” she says. “Traditional poetry is designed to be purposefully opaque. The reader is required to do multiple readings. On the other hand, spoken-word poetry does not exist after the performance.”

Ron Horn, however, says the transitory nature of spoken word doesn’t mean it doesn’t pack a massive kick.

“There’s a hidden lesson in hip hop: tolerance and respect. As the performer, you have three minutes of everyone’s undivided attention. I think it encourages a person to become the next leader — it’s sometimes not enough just to speak for myself, but for others who maybe can’t speak.”