Mark Anthony Neal Lectures at the University of Wisconsin at Madison | February 13, 2012

Getting Real II: Hip-Hop Pedagogy, Performance & Culture in the Classroom & Beyond

UW OMAI lecture series: 

"When You See Me, See You: Hip-Hop, Wealth & Social Justice" by Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal

When: 02/13/12 @ 7:00pm
Cost: Room 1101
Call: 890-1006
Web: www.omai.wisc.edu


HIP-HOP TEACHING, PERFORMANCE AND CULTURE

Using hip-hop pedagogy as a teaching tool to integrate topics from history, politics and art to culture and performance in the classroom will be the topic of the second annual lecture series "Getting Real II" at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this spring.

The free 15-week lecture series will begin Monday, Jan. 23 in Room 1101 Grainger Hall and is sponsored by the UW-Madison Office of the Vice Provost for Diversity and Climate and the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI). Each week's lecture will begin at 7 p.m. and all are free and open to the public.

The series features internationally renowned educator and specialist on multicultural education UW-Madison professor Gloria Ladson-Billings as host and a slate of guests from the top universities and leaders in the growing field of hip-hop studies.

This year's series will examine how the pedagogy imbedded in traditional spoken word and the contemporary hip-hop movement is being used by educators to teach a broad range of traditional topics in the classroom and serve as an innovative approach to engaging students who have been historically under-served by traditional schooling.

Ladson-Billings is the current Kellner Family Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the 2005-2006 president of the American Educational Research Association. Her research examines the pedagogical practices of teachers who are successful with African American students.

Guest lecturers will focus on how hip-hop culture and culturally relevant teaching can serve as innovative approaches to help bridge the achievement gap in our nation's public schools through the creation of new strategies and curricula.

"Educators give lip service to the concept of 'critical thinking' but reduce the concept to the ability to perform on sections of standardized tests of conventional reading," says OMAI Executive Director Willie Ney, whose office oversees the nation's only college-level program dedicated to teaching through the use of hip-hop.

The internationally recognized First Wave Hip-Hop Theater Ensemble is now in its fifth year at UW-Madison.

"The basic premise of the series is that true critical thinking is stimulated through a critical pedagogy-one that challenges typical orthodoxy to help students ask incisive questions about the nature of the current social, political, economic, and cultural order," Ney says.

One of the more innovative strategies for engaging students in critical thinking is through hip-hop culture, Ney adds. Similar to the work of the 1950s and 1960s citizenship schools and freedom schools, New Studies (e.g. black studies, Chicano studies, women's studies) and popular culture studies, hip-hop culture pulls on the organic and local culture of students to help them see the ways grassroots movements engage learners and help produce transformation.

"This series will pull on educational theories such as socio-cultural theory, culturally relevant pedagogy, critical media theory, post-colonial theory and critical race theory to help participants connect hip hop as both an art form and a pedagogical tool to improve the academic success of students who remain marginalized in our schools," Ney says.

For more information on the series call 608-890-1006 or visit http://www.omai.wisc.edu

Schedule for "Getting Real II: Hip Hop Pedagogy, Performance and Culture in the Classroom and Beyond," Monday evenings at 7 p.m., Room 1101 Grainger Hall:


Feb. 6 - "Why the Charter School Movement Has It Wrong and How We Can Make It Right" featuring guest speaker Kaleem Caire, CEO Urban League of Greater Madison.

Feb. 13 - "When You See Me, See You: Hip-Hop, Wealth and Social Justice," professor Mark Anthony Neal of Duke University.

Feb. 20 - Guest Speakers assistant professor Dawn-Elissa Fischer and adjunct professor and journalist Davey D of San Francisco State University.

Feb. 27 - "Developing Critical Hip-Hop Feminist Literacies of Black Womanhood in an Afterschool Program," featuring Docta E, also known as professor Elaine Richardson of Ohio State University.

March 5 - "Everybody Make Some Noise: The Audience Dynamic in Youth Spoken Word" with Anna West, youth Spoken Word organizer and doctoral student from Louisiana State University.

March 12 - "Global Ill-literacies: Hip Hop Culture(s), Youth Identities, and the Politics of Literacy," featuring associate professor Samy Alim of Stanford University.

March 19 - "Partners in Rhyme: Hip-Hop and Global Democracy," Gloria Ladson-Billings.

March 26 - Guest speaker and author Marc Lamont Hill of Columbia University.

April 9 - "Re-Imagining Teaching and Learning: A Snapshot of Hip-Hop Education" featuring guest speaker New York University adjunct professor Martha Diaz and Eddie Fergus, deputy director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education and research assistant professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at New York University.

April 16 - Guest speaker TBA

April 23 - "Into the Traffic Jam: Contradictions, Interruptions, Classrooms and Hip-Hop" featuring guest speaker associate professor David Stovall, University of Illinois-Chicago.

April 30 - "First Wave Pedagogy: Roots to Routes to Roots" featuring Christopher Walker, UW-Madison assistant professor of dance and First Wave Hip-Hop Theater Ensemble artistic director.

May 7 - "Final Cypher: Showcase Performances of Curriculum and Instruction," featuring 375 seminar participants. This event will be held at 7 p.m. in the H'Doubler Performance Space in Lathrop Hall, 1050 University Ave.

The Progressive Roots and Disastrous Consequences of Test Driven Pedagogy

The Progressive Roots and Disastrous Consequences of Test Driven Pedagogy 

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

When the nation turned to the right in the 1980's and 1990's and neo-liberalism in its many manifestations began to dominate the policies of both political parties, parents in inner city neighborhoods desperate to do something in their increasingly violent, impoverished neighborhoods turned to schools to try to reverse the growing class and race inequality in the nation which  they feared—quite accurately—was putting their children gravely at risk. In looking for help, they turned their attention to the one institution that had not abandoned their neighborhoods, the public schools and tried to figure out some way to have schools serve their needs.

In trying to make schools work better, they ended up, making what turned out to be a Faustian bargain with leaders in corporations and foundations looking to revolutionize American education through technology. In city after city across the country, inner city parents and their advocates decided to endorse the application of universal testing in the schools to show how far their children were falling behind, and with it, the imposition of a test driven pedagogy, pioneered by charter schools, designed to bring their children up to the levels of middle class and upper middle class children in the acquisition of basic skills, and with it give their children an opportunity, in an increasingly hierarchical society, to gain entry into the middle class

Unfortunately, the whole strategy was destined to fail. It is difficult, if not impossible, to use the public schools to create greater class and race equality , when tax policy, income policy, and numerous informal dimensions of class privilege maximize those polarities., especially when the pedagogy involved discouraged creativity and critical thinking. The result proved to be the exact opposite of what is intended, despite the enthusiastic support of all levels of government and corporations and private philanthropy. Since No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have been institutionalized, Black, Latino and poor people, have fallen further behind the white middle class and upper class  in every important social indicator, from unemployment rates, to the wealth gap, to home ownership and life expectancy.

And this leaves supporters of democratic education in a difficult position. We have to challenge a strategy that originally had widespread support in inner city communities. But challenge it we must. Just because minority parents, in their desperation to do something about rampant inequality, decided to push for more testing and more accountability for schools based on those tests, doesn't mean the strategy was sound. In my judgment, it made schools in poor communities less able to prepare their students for college and a demanding job market than schools in middle class communities—including the ones policy makers send their children—which rely far less on standardized tests.

Moreover, such pedagogy discourages introducing young people, in struggling neighborhoods, to the critical thinking skills necessary to foster social justice activism—the only force that can realistically reduce racial and class in equality in this society. Teaching students individual mobility skills is a poor substitute for direct involvement in  neighborhood  redevelopment and in  political movements—like Occupy Wall Street—that put demands on all levels of government for a redistribution of wealth.

A test driven pedagogy aimed at  reducing "The Achievement Gap" is not only counterproductive in its own terms, it undermines the acquisition of the very skills necessary to reinvigorate democracy and fight  effectively for racial and economic equality. Or to put the matter more bluntly, anyone who supports the imposition of more standardized tests in the nation's public schools is PLAYING THE MAN'S GAME!!!

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.