Stovall, D. "We Can Relate"

subtitle, Hip-Hop Culture, Critical Pedagogy, and the Secondary Classroom.

Some really interesting references here. The title looks a lot like what I'm thinking about pursuing, but the actual article was a little more practical and less theoretical than I plan to go. Stovall participates/lead workshops with high school students and they use rap lyrics to bring up social issues. In the article, he brings up many Critical Pedagogy heavy hitters, but he doesn't go into all that much depth about how the theories or Shor or Freire, for example, were played out in the classroom. I think the most interesting part is when they talk about places in everyday life where they feel deceived, and many of the students responded, "school." That's more like what I"m talking about. Stovall brings in Howard Zinn and (a personal fav) James Baldwin, who adds a lovely quote about literacy to the mix: "A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience." I don't think that could be much more similar to Gee's discussion of how often times school discourse run counter to students' primary discourses: same idea; different language. Leave it to Baldwin, though, to just hit it on the head.

I wish this article had either been a full on study of the classroom and what they did, or been a more theoretical piece about the effects of a school system that essentially lies to non-mainstream students and/or tries to make them believe that the only way to succeed is to "repudiate their experiences."

A lot of great references here, though. Notably, Black Star and Reflection Eternal.