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Hybrid Texts: Fifth Graders, Rap Music,and Writing

Mary Christianakis Urban Education 2011 46: 1131 DOI: 10.1177/0042085911400326 The online version of this article can be found at: http://uex.sagepub.com/content/46/5/1131
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Hybrid Texts: Fifth Graders, Rap Music, and Writing

Mary Christianakis1
Urban Education 46(5) 11311168 The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0042085911400326 http://uex.sagepub.com
Abstract Consistent with a sociocritical frame and the analytic tools of hybridity theory, this article explicates how urban fifth-grade children made language hybrids using rap and poetry to participate in classroom literacy. Ethnographic data from a yearlong study illustrate two key findings. First, standards-based and canon-driven writing models maintained literacy and language borders through antihybrid practices based in antipopular ideologies. Second, the children used hybrid rap poems to negotiate and challenge linguistic and ideological constraints that hemmed in classroom literacy. The author suggests that canon-driven writing pedagogies be more inclusive of youth popular cultures and culturally relevant literacies. Keywords language, elementary school, cultural responsiveness, popular culture, urban, culturally relevant pedagogy, ethnography, literacy
Introduction
Rayjon, a fifth grader in Mr. Mitchells class, walks to the pencil sharpener after taking off his jacket. He is wearing an oversized black T-shirt. On the front, in white letters it reads, Im down for yall. The back reads, when my homies call, lyrics composed by the late hip-hop artist, Tupac Shakur.1 As the other fifth graders enter the classroom, Aqueenah and Synchro walk by Rayjon and stop suddenly. Aqueenah
1
Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA
Corresponding Author: Professor Mary Christianakis, PhD, Occidental College, Department of Education, 1600 Campus Rd., Los Angeles, CA 90041 Email: mary@oxy.edu
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Urban Education 46(5)
reads aloud, Im down for yall, then she turns Rayjon around by the shoulder and reads again, when my homies call. Aqueenah: What you talking about homies? You aint got no homies in them hills. (gestures to hills and touches Rayjons shoulder) Rayjon: (sucks his teeth) Uhhh! (look of disgust at the shoulder that Aqueenah touched) you dont know what youre talking about. Why you all up on me? Aqueenah: You wish I was up on you. But you aint got no homies. Synchro and Aqueenah walk off shaking their heads, mumbling about how Rayjon was trying to pretend that he was tough, but that he led a pampered life, up in them hills, referencing the upper-middle class, mostly White, neighborhood of the city. A few hours later during writing time, Rayjon stands at Aqueenahs desk with Ron, Andy, and Clyde at his side. Their arms are tucked under their armpits and their legs spread wider than shoulder distance. Rayjon fishes out a piece of notebook paper from his pocket, unfolds it, and reads the following rap: Ever since we was in preschool And we was real cool Drinking some Kool-Aid Makin Pokemon trade. You in your school, Me in mine. As Rayjon reads, Aqueenah lowers her eyelids to half-mast and leadens her stare. Synchro, behind her, rolls her eyes and purses her lips. On finishing, Rayjon refolds his paper, spins around on his heel and walks away from the girls, an orchestrated move that the other boys replicate. As far as the boys are concerned, Rayjons rap poem fulfilled its purposeto prove to Aqueenah and Synchro that despite their accusation that Rayjon lived in a wealthy area and that his friends are diverse and not exclusively Black, Rayjon is very much a Black young male, with homies. As the above field note shows, classrooms are sites where children use texts to negotiate social membership, friendship, common interests, and joint agendas. Those textual negotiations often include references to popular culture familiar to children from their communities and family lives (Dyson, 2003a). In diverse and urban classrooms like Mr. Mitchells, students attempt
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to connect the seemingly disparate, yet overlapping, social and literate worlds of hip-hop and school through their play, talk, and writing. However, those curricular connections are not easily made in a standards-based accountability environment. Teachers and students in urban and diverse settings often struggle to make schooling culturally relevant, while meeting curricular and institutional mandates that do not include hip-hop, rap, or other popular texts. The resulting tensions leave many students academically disengaged from schooling. This possible tension underscores the need for a better understanding of both how children attempt to make school more meaningful, and of whether popular culture need be perceived as antithetical to schooling. To explore these issues, I set out to answer the following questions: (a) How does Mr. Mitchells writing pedagogy differentiate rap from literacy? (b) How did his fifth-grade students attempt to incorporate rap into classroom writing? These questions emerged from a larger yearlong ethnographic case study that explored how peer social worlds in Mr. Mitchells urban fifth-grade classroom shaped and were shaped by writing during Writers Workshops. I use a sociocritical frame and the analytic tools of hybridity theory to explicate how the fifth-grade children negotiated curricular boundaries differentiating rap from classroom literacy to create rap hybrids. I situate the students rap writings in their institutional context to provide a place-based (Dirlik, 1999) understanding of hybridity, which I define as a situated, dialogic, and ongoing social accomplishment emerging from negotiated tensions between contested (long-standing and newer) forms and functions in language, history, and culture. In using hybridity as an analytic tool, I take a phenomenological approach that borrows from both hybridity theory and the literature of hybridity as pedagogy. As such, I focus on how the students brought together rap and classroom writing. Situating rap-literacy hybridity in Mr. Mitchells classroom context allows for a close examination of textual boundaries between rap and classroom writing. I aim to show two key findings. First, standards-based and canon-driven writing models (e.g., Calkins & Oxenhorn, 2005), which seek to lure children away from popular culture and toward adult-chosen literary sources, can maintain hegemonic literacy boundaries based in antipopular ideologies. Data show how these boundaries and the institutional push toward canonical literature often limited the use of rap music during Mr. Mitchells Writers Workshop. Second, the data show that at times the children and teacher negotiated space for rap hybrids; however, at other times the ideological cleavage between rap and school goals (Au, 2005) was too great. The cleavage did not represent the mismatch between home and school language practices (e.g.,
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Heath, 1983) per se, but rather, the ideological biases in pedagogies based on teaching canonical school literacies. Data analysis reveals restrictions to hybridity linked to that ideological cleavage. I focus on how the children negotiated those restrictions with their teacher to incorporate rap into their writing space.
Literature Review
In California, the Language Arts Standards (1998) call for upper elementary grade students to learn through literature and genre-based literacy instruction. To accomplish the standards, students must write narratives, expository pieces, and poetry. In addition, they must respond to, write about, and present literature including poetry, autobiographies, fiction, and nonfiction. In their written and spoken work, the standards specify the use of American Standard English. The goals of Writers Workshop align with the standards outlined by the state of California. Writers Workshop approaches (Calkins, 1994; Calkins & Oxenhorn, 2005) propose genre-based writing pedagogies that pursue the study of poetry, memoir, and literary nonfiction. According to Calkins & Oxenhorn (2005), teachers must encourage students to move away from action-based fiction and toward narrative writing. Writers Workshops that focus on memoir or narrative writing encourage students to write about authentic life experiences, rather than fictional scenarios, which reflect reliance on popular television show storylines (Newkirk, 2007). Contemporary explorations of popular culture and elementary school literacy, however, challenge the exclusion of popular and media-driven instruction (Newkirk, 2007). Research demonstrates how popular texts, such as comics, rap music, videogames, and television can make literacy learning more meaningful for diverse students (Blair & Stanford, 2004; Dyson, 1997, 2003b; Fisherkeller, 2000; Gee, 2003; Morrison, Bryan, & Chilcoat, 2002; Newkirk, 2002; 2007). Nevertheless, studies on rap, literacy, and upper elementary age children are limited. With the exception of Dysons work in primary grades (2003a; 2003b), virtually all of the research on rap and literacy describes secondary education settings. In addition to a gap in the study of upper elementary students, ethnographic studies of rap and literacy have not to date examined how students negotiate the use of rap in standards-based accountability environments. In the literature review that follows, I explore rap and literacy studies to highlight their curricular, pedagogical, and theoretical implications. I then turn to postmodern and critical theories of hybridity to develop my own
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analytic languagenegotiated hybriditywhich I use to illustrate how the children used hybrids to negotiate literacy boundaries in their standardsbased environment.
Rap in the Classroom

Through an inductive analysis of the literature, I find that research exploring rap and literacy advocate four distinct approaches. The first two approaches, the bridge and the scaffold, describe the utility of rap and hip-hop as pedagogical tools in high school literature classrooms. Both suggest that understanding symbols, conflicts, and the poetics of rap can help urban high school students connect to canonical school literature. However, critical pedagogues argue that using hip-hop to gain entry into canonical texts privileges Western literature over popular texts, thus undermining diverse childrens experiences. Consequently, they call for a third approachrap as a critical text and pedagogy. Accordingly, teachers should incorporate rap lyrics as classroom texts to encourage culturally relevant, critical thinking, analysis, and transformation. The fourth approachrap as hybridpostulates that rap literacies blur both space and identity and thus, allow for students and teachers to meld their social worlds.
Utilitarian Approaches to Rap and Literacy

Most early research on rap and literacy (e.g., Mahiri, 1996) emerged in the 1990s soon after hip-hop became part of the mainstream culture (Lusane, 1993). At the time, educators began thinking of ways to connect rap to school curricula to help at risk or minority children improve school literacy. Two metaphors that describe the connection between rap and literacy emerged within the researchthe bridge (Mahiri & Sablo, 1996) and the scaffold (LHomme, 2000). Both metaphors depict rap as a useful tool that can both supplement and support academic literacy. The bridge metaphor is the oldest and most pervasive in the literature on rap and literacy (e.g., Mahiri & Sablo, 1996). Those who call on the metaphor argue, [h]ip-hop can be used as a bridge linking the seemingly vast span between the streets and the world of academics (Mahiri & Sablo, 1996; Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002, p. 89). For example, Mahiri (1996) finds that when English teachers used rap texts (both oral and written) with high school African American students, the majority of the students improved their writing. Hence, he argues, literacy skills developed through the study of hip-hop transfer to academic writing. Given the evidence demonstrating the
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effectiveness of using rap as a bridge, Evelyn (2000) maintains that by refusing to acknowledge the link between Black youth culture and rap music, academia perpetuates the Black-White achievement gap. Similarly, Ginwright (2004) contends that hip-hop offers an opportunity to center urban school literacy reform around the needs of Black youth. Rap music as a bridge may serve pedagogical objectives, but does not account for a number of complexities that may come with bringing rap and literacy together. While the metaphor connects in-school with out-of-school literacies, it remains unidirectional. That is, it undertheorizes how academic writing may shape the kinds of raps that youth create and how youth may interpret antischool messages within rap. It also minimizes the larger political world in which school literacy and hip-hop constitute themselves as different and separate. Last, the bridge approach in no way challenges the canon or the primacy of traditional analytic writing. The rap-as-scaffold metaphor underscores that teachers can utilize rap music to help students both access challenging school readings and produce written texts. Rap, for example, can serve as a scaffold to develop reading skills (LHomme, 2000). To illustrate, Lynch (2007) finds that high school students understand difficult texts, such as Chaucer, when teachers allow them to use rap as their medium of expression. His New York City high school students connected Chaucer with the lyrics of rapper Eminem to create poems and record a rap compact disk. Similarly, Cooks (2004) finds that one of his focal students, who wished he had had an opportunity to write the rap first because it would have helped him get his ideas down on paper, also benefited from utilizing rap (Cooks, 2004, p. 75). In the end, the rap-asscaffold metaphor provides students with the stability and support to use their literacy tools in school settings. However, as a temporary tool, rap, like the scaffold, must be removed to reveal the real product (i.e., standard canonical schoolwork) that must be capable of standing on its own like a completed edifice. As a scaffold, rap then is only useful insofar as it helps to accomplish traditional schoolwork. Also problematic is that the scaffold metaphor ignores student intentionality. While teachers may imagine that they will use rap or hiphop to scaffold real learning, students may use it to undermine and disparage traditional school literacies, knowledge, and practicesa common theme in rap lyrics, in fact. Hence, while the teachers may seek to improve school texts with the use of rap, the children may not share those same agendas.
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Critical Texts, Critical Pedagogy, and Rap

The critical texts-critical pedagogies approaches call for rap lyrics to be included amongst other literary texts. Quintero & Cooks (2002) define rap as a kind of poetry and promote its inclusion in the school canon. With rap as a legitimate corpus of study, teachers, schools, and academics are called on to interrogate what counts as academic achievement and consider how definitions of literacy need to expand (Morrell, 2002). Proponents of rap as a critical text argue that rap is a valid area of knowledge that acknowledges the literacy and life experiences of youth (Brown, 1995). Its use offers teachers the opportunity to engage students in broader critical discussions on knowledge construction (Stovall, 2006a). In an action research study, Stovall (2006a) finds that analyzing hip-hop with predominantly African American students is a critical pedagogy, because rap interrogates traditional school texts. Using hip-hop as a social studies text, Stovall led high school students to examine the nature and varieties of hip-hop. Those discussions led to broader critical discussions on knowledge construction. Critical rap literacy takes into account the possibility that rap and hip-hop may serve to dismantle, rather than scaffold, traditional school literacies. The critical text approach also challenges the traditional hierarchies of knowledge and discipline and shows how the most vulnerable disenfranchised youth can reconnect and engage in schooling. As a result, through rap, teachers can validate urban students while teaching them to interpret popular texts critically (Morrell, 2002Paul, 2000; Scherpf, 2001). For example, Hill (2009) conducted a year-long ethnography in a hip-hop-centered continuation high school English course and found that by studying Hip-Hop Lit, students enacted a practice of wounded healing, through storytelling. That is, by articulating common experiences expressed in shared textual understandings, hip-hop literature offered Hills African American students opportunities to form community and recover from past emotional injuries, such as racism. Critical approaches seek to broaden the canon, expand literacy, and challenge Eurocentric curricula. Critical understandings of rap music, such as that of Tupac Shakur, reveal how Eurocentric curricula have served to subjugate the knowledge of African American people. Rap helps to recover that knowledge and reconnect students to school through culturally relevant text and youth popular cultures. As a result, critical approaches may threaten the knowledge hierarchy in school texts by dismissing standardized and traditional school curricula. Broadening the canon and making space for rap as a valid critical classroom text is fraught with challenges. During an era of curricular standardization and
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accountability, most classroom teachers must follow pacing plans aimed at meeting curricular standards. Consider, for example, that many of the studies discussed above took place in nontraditional school settings with actionresearchers or guest teachers who, unlike regularly paid teachers, had the freedom to work outside of codified canonical materials. Furthermore, the parental and administrative dispositions influencing classroom instruction may also prove difficult. In my study, I too show how students attempted to use rap in their classroom work to make a space for their literacy repertoires. I build on critical perspectives to show how the children used rap to push up against canonical hegemonic literary texts. In addition, though, I also analyze the institutional constraints restricting the use of rap music during classroom writing.
Hybridity, Literacy, and Rap

Hybridity, the bringing together of childrens multiple textual lives and repertoires, is another approach used to incorporate rap in classroom writing. Exploring childrens use of hip-hop or rap as a hybrid practice offers a phenomenological understanding of students intertextual language practices, rather than an explanation of how to use rap as a pedagogical tool, as suggested by the bridge and scaffold approaches. Children in school may initiate and practice hybridities by bringing together all of their multiple language practices from home, peer worlds, and popular cultures. For instance, in a yearlong study of first graders, Dyson found diverse and urban children recontextualizing (transporting and transforming) material across symbolic and social borders (Dyson, 2003b, p. 10). The children borrowed music, television, and sports media to revoice, reorganize, and rearticulate media into school materials. Popular media became the childrens textual toys. Dysons studies illuminate the power of breaking down symbolic and social borders. Hybridity in the context of school literacy is not simply an outcome or byproduct; it is a process of negotiating social borders to accomplish a social intertextuality in schoolwork. Hybridity also accounts for how students incorporate school language practices into their community lives. Childrens writing can teach us about how they use texts to navigate, synthesize and hybridize multiple spaces (Moje, 2002, p. 115). For instance, in a case study, Jocson (2006) discovered that a young teenager, Antonio, did not enjoy school literacy because he felt that it did not connect to his life, yet he was also very critical of rap music because it was too commercial. To reconcile his conflicts, Antonio brought hip-hop into the classroom and used poetry out in his community settings. By
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bringing together self-produced rap beats, Antonio could address his own concerns by making himself both a consumer and producer of rap in the context of Spoken Word performances. In so doing, Antonio enacted a hybridity, which Jocson (2006) defines as the blurring of two or more physical and aesthetic spaces in within or out-of-school environments that allow students to make new forms (p. 237). As Jocsons work points out, hybridity is a melding together of aesthetic spaces and practices to dissolve the literary and social boundaries between school and life. Unlike scaffold approaches, hybridity does not appropriate rap temporarily to support traditional classroom literacy. Similarly, hybridity differs from bridge approaches in that it does not maintain rap and classroom writing as separate practices. Finally, while the intent of a critical approach is the deconstruction of traditional texts, hybridity emphasizes the melding together of various texts. More to the point, hybridity does not seek to dismantle traditional classroom texts using both the content and aesthetics of rap, but rather to challenge the primacy of the canon by making room for popular texts. Hybridity also describes the blurring of identities of those using hip-hop. Stovall (2006b), for example, presents a case study on four poetry educators to show how they infuse their creative lives, linked to spoken word, within teaching. By bringing together their creative and teaching worlds, these educators believed that they made an intellectual home for adolescents using hip-hop to cope with life and learning. Their hybridized identities as poetry educators offered a space of belonging for the secondary age students they served. However, hybridity in literature-driven, standards-based classrooms is difficult. Certainly, rap and poetry share similarities, such as rhyming, alliteration, rhythm, free verse, assonance, and consonance (Attridge, 2002; Krims, 2001). Still, there are differences between rap and poetry that are social in nature. Each genre may represent different communities, use different analytic language, explore different themes, and come from different traditions. Rap uses the language of beats and flow, while poetry uses the language of meter and euphony (Attridge, 2002). Even though the analytic terms represent similar poetic features, they come from different ideological and disciplinary traditions. In addition, as Krims (2001) documents, rap lyrics explore sociopolitical themes related to, among other issues, sex, crime, fame, illegal activity, hedonism, gangster life, and name-brand materialism. Canonical poetry explores some, but not all of those themes. Finally, the performative dimensions of rap and poetry diverge in contemporary times. Attridge (2002) argues that while the earliest poets (e.g., Homer) sang their poems, contemporary poets read their poems aloud, typically unaccompanied by music. In contrast, [r]ap lyrics are written to be performed to an accompaniment that
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emphasizes the metrical structure of the verse (p. 90). As such, rap artists must syncopate their lyrics to a beat, control breathing, respond to melodies or harmonies, as well as enunciate accordingly. Contemporary rap artists also do not read from a rehearsed script, but rather they perform rap as though freestyling to music, while they incorporate mundane elements from their surrounding environment as evidence of their ability to improvise. The four approaches to rap discussed in this articlebridge, scaffold, critical text, and hybriddiffer in their basic tenets and the roles required of teachers and students (see Table 1). Bridge and scaffold approaches construct rap as a temporary literacy used to access and support hegemonic school literacy curriculum. They also rely on the teacher to facilitate the connection. Critical approaches also rely on the teacher to build toward legitimizing more culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladsen-Billings, 1994) that accounts for class, race, and youth cultures and challenges the primacy of hegemonic literacy curriculum that privileges a traditional canon. The last approach, hybridity, is an act of change, as it suggests an opening of the curriculum for students to create a third space (Gutirrez, BaquedanoLopez, & Tejeda, 1999), a more inclusive dialogic space in the literacy curriculum that affords students the opportunity to choose from their multiple and overlapping identities and literacy repertoires. Hybridity, in the context of a standards-based classroom like Mr. Mitchells, reveals the degree to which traditional literacies and texts remain fixed and may in fact limit curricular openings for noncanonical texts. However, limited hybridity should not be understood as a compromise, or a modified version of the bridge and scaffold, as these two approaches still maintain school literacy separate from popular texts. Furthermore, unlike the critical approach, hybridity does not necessarily position itself as an explicit critique of traditional texts and therefore must account for standard curricula. Building on the concept of hybridity, this article focuses on the childrens intertextual literacy practices that generated rap poem hybrids. I contextualize the childrens attempts at hybridity by studying the childrens rap poems as social phenomena accomplished within the interactional and institutional forces that differentiated rap from school poetry. To understand how the children in the present study negotiated curricular space for rap poems, and the challenges they encountered, I now offer some analytic language, which I used to examine my findings.
HybridityUnderstanding Power at the Center and Margins

Hybridity theories applied to school writing must move beyond the idea of mixing or blurring to account for relations of power. In an accountability

Critiques To use rap texts to connect student learning to canonical texts. To use rap to develop literacy skills that students apply to canonical texts. To embed rap into the curriculum as texts worthy of critical analysis. Role of teachers Role of students To recognize similarities between rap texts and canonical texts. To apply literacy skills learned from rap analysis to canonical texts. To use critical lens developed in rap study to critique school texts.
Table 1. Pedagogical Approaches to Rap in Classroom Literacy
Approaches
Basic tenets
Bridge
Scaffold
Critical text
Hybrid
Rap music bridges popular The ultimate goal is school youth literacy practices literacy achievement by with canonical school way of a unidirectional literacy practices. emphasis on canonical poetry. Rap music provides The scaffold is temporary, literacy support for giving the message that rap youth as they develop is a transitional literacy. literacy needed for canonical texts. Rap music is a legitimate 1. Critical use of rap is text, worthy of study, hard to implement in an through which teachers accountability, standardsdevelop a critical driven environment. pedagogy to examine all 2. Critical use of rap may texts. undermine school curriculum. Rap music use hybridizes 1. Rap music does not meet the classroom space curricular standards. and youth texts to 2. Allowing rap may incorporate both undermine school popular literacies and curriculum. canonical literacies.
To expand definitions of To construct texts using literacy to include rap, the literacy skills from hip hop, and spoken both rap literacies and word alongside and canonical classroom intertwined with literacies. canonical texts.
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environment, school districts hold teachers and students accountable to particular standards-based curricula, which they validate by testing. Such tests, hardly account for childrens cultural and textual resources and thus exclude rap. Hybridity occurs through conflict within institutional power dynamics that mediate language repertoires, such as rap and canonical poetry. Conflicts surrounding the use of rap in the classroom are rooted in historical confrontation between long-standing forms (e.g., canonical, literate) and different contested ones (popular, oral). In maintaining such dualisms, schooling reproduces a cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984). Bourdieu maintains that education level and class standing create a hierarchy of tastes. In his study, those least educated preferred texts deemed popular, while those who had a higher education and social class standing displayed tastes for works deemed legitimate or highbrow. Because the more educated tend to hold positions of power, their knowledge and textual preferences result in a tacit accumulation of cultural capital that they exchange for positional hierarchy. In the United States, where race and class are interrelated, cultural capital promulgated by schooling typically promotes a hegemonic curriculum (Connell, 1982) privileging the tastes of upper and middle-class Whites. Hybridity, which emerges from individual and collective creativity, challenges those hegemonic strongholds, as it introduces nondominant social practices and structures to generate new cultural products (Garcia Canclini, 1995 p. xxvii). However, generating new practices and structures is still regulated by the contexts in which they are created and performed. In the case of classrooms, hybridity is not often welcome, and anti-hybrids (Freedman, 1997) maintain disciplinary boundaries (e.g., strict genre standards). Kraidy (2005) argues that hybridity is only possible because those in power allow its existence: hybridity is hegemonically constructed in the interest of dominant societal sectors because it selects aspects of language and culture to appropriate, such as music, art, and crafts, but excludes religion and politics (p. 67). This process of selective hybridization creates a bleaching effect by hybridizing only the most benign practices that give people of color their full identities. Hybridization is possible, Bentley (1993) argues, only when favored by a powerful set of political, social, or economic incentives (p. 3). In addition, according to Spivak (1999), hybridity might reproduce hegemonic relations. As a result, the examination of hybrid texts must account for how hybridity can simultaneously challenge hegemonic curriculum and yet remain conscribed by it. I explore this theoretical tension of hybridity as I analyze instances when Mr. Mitchell deemed rap lyrics and music texts as acceptable and when he deemed them inappropriate for the classroom.
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In my findings section, I analyze the students use of rap in the classroom to interpret why, at times, rap and classroom writing c[a]me together and consciously f[ou]ght it out on the territory of the utterance (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 360). As I argue below, in this fight over language and territory, Mr. Mitchell and the students were simultaneously in conversation with and in opposition to one another.
Hybridity as a Process
Hybridity is not only an outcome, but also a process. Hybridization happens through decollecting, dehistoricizing, and deterritorializing (Garcia Canclini, 1995). It breaks up neat narratives held together by genres, time periods, or topics and recombines them into new texts. My analysis of the childrens rap poetry hybrids brings pieces of different registers, cultural references, and territories and reconstructs them in the school-situated context. I examine why the children used registers such popular vernacular versus Standard English, as well how they referenced themes and artists rooted in popular culture. Analysis accounts for how Mr. Mitchells writing curriculum supported literacy exploration as well as how it restricted particular identities and lifestyles. A critical approach to hybridity also takes into account how social groups benefit by sustaining or relaxing boundaries between two cultural forms. Cultural critic, Werbner (1997) argues that during difficult times, hybridity falls under scrutiny as proponents of dominant and marginal forms demonize one another. For example, in response to a Western European-based pedagogy, rap artists use schools as their counterpoint (e.g., Dead Prez and KRS-12) and in response to standards-based curricula schools insist on suggested reading lists (California State Board of Education, 2001) that exclude popular media and music.
HybridityConfounding Contradictions
A theory of hybridity that accounts for rap and literacy in the classroom must be able to explain ambivalence and resistance to its existence. For example, a strong theory must explain how and why cultural hybrids such as rap literacies are still able to disturb and shock . . . in a postmodern world that celebrates difference through a consumer market that offers a seemingly endless choice of unique identities, subcultures and styles. (Werbner, 1997, p. 21). As educators, we must account for contradictions that on one hand, support multiculturalism (Banks, 1997), culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladsen-Billings, 1994), student textual interests (Newkirk, 2007), and student
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voices (Lensmire, 1994), and on the other hand curtail such explorations through standardization of the curriculum. In summary, previous studies on rap and literacy document how scholars have argued for more inclusive ways of conceptualizing school literacy so that schooling does not alienate students from their own language practices. Hybridity theorists go further, by arguing that rap music not only links childrens interests to schooling but also melds the language of rap with the language of school. I extend this position by examining the actual process of hybridization and by arguing that the rap hybrids in Mr. Mitchells classroom resulted, in large part, from an institutional ambivalence toward rap and rap artists.
Method Site,Teacher, and Students

The site. Mr. Mitchells fifth-grade classroom at Roosevelt Elementary School was located in Bismark, an economically and racially diverse city in the East San Francisco Bay.3 As an urban school, it served a racially diverse student population. Approximately 42% of the students were African American, 13% were Asian, 9% were Latino, and 28% were White. According to Mr. Mitchell, the school drew from three distinct populations. One group, located in the western part of the school district, was mainly working-class Latino and African American. The second population racially mixed working class, was located in the center of the city. The third group, mainly working and middle-class Asian and White, was located in the northernmost part of the city. The teacher. Mr. Mitchell, a White man in his mid-30s, was an experienced and skilled teacher, with special interest in writing and communication. After receiving his bachelors degree in communication, he pursued his teaching credential in elementary education. Mr. Mitchell learned to teach writing using a literature-driven Writers Workshop (Calkins, 1994; Calkins & Oxenhorn, 2005). He linked his Writers Workshop to his language arts curriculum, so that when the children studied poems, he assigned them poetry writing during workshop time; and when they read autobiographies, he asked them to write autobiographical narratives. He often expressed frustration with skills-based testing at the state and national levels. Mr. Mitchell believed that testing skills burdened the language arts curriculum and limited him creatively and pedagogically. As a result, Mr. Mitchell made curricular space for Writers Workshop, which was not a skills-based writing approach. Mr. Mitchells Writers Workshop included composing, researching, editing,
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performing, and publishing. He believed that teaching the fifth graders to write was his most important charge because writing was the key to success in middle school. The students. There were as many as 27 students in the classroom at any one time; two of the children moved away during data collection and two children moved into the classroom. The 12 boys and 15 girls were also racially diverse (10 African Americans, 11 Whites, 6 Asian and East Asian) Three of the children who self-identified as being of one race referred to themselves as mixed when speaking with peers.
Ethnographic Methods, Role as ParticipantObserver, Data Collection, and Analysis Ethnographic Methods
Using ethnographic methods, specifically participant-observation, I observed the fifth-grade children in Mr. Mitchells classroom during writing time, at recess, and sometimes at lunch every school day throughout the academic year, from October through June. In all, I made 118 observations. The focus of this study of rap poem hybrids is part of a larger research agenda in which I explored how social dynamics of peer worlds shaped classroom writing practicesand vice versa. My focus on social dimensions of writing required observations of daily classroom life. Observing the childrens everyday classroom life revealed particular classroom practices (Miller & Goodnow, 1995) that shaped the contexts for the childrens writing development (e.g., composing, editing, and publishing). Ethnographic methods provided insights into the contextual and institutional influences (Heath & Street, 2008) on social participation and textual productions (Dyson & Genishi, 2005). While collecting data, I sought the students emic points of view to understand how the social dynamics organized classroom writing. Emic viewpoints were particularly important because they provided culturally based perspectives, interpretations of behavior, events and situations and [did] so in the descriptive language they themselves use[d] (Watson-Gegeo, 1988, p. 580). Using the students and teachers talk, I developed analytic language grounded in the life of the classroom.
Role as Participant Observer

Mr. Mitchell introduced me to the class as a former teacher and graduate student interested in figuring out how children learn to write. As a result,
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children often offered me samples of their writing and provided unsolicited narratives of how they learned to write. My role evolved over time. I began as more of an observer. Observing helped me avoid the teacher role. As I came to know the children, they engaged me in extended conversations within the context of their daily school lives. As interested as I was in them, the children were interested in me. Whenever they asked me where I was from, I explained I am from Los Angeles, which gave me cache with those students who had family down south. In my role as participant-observer, I documented the childrens authorial process throughout the making of several pieces. I audiotaped the classroom conversations and collected the childrens writing samples. I attended to all students and their writing with genuine interest but offered no evaluative comments. I came to the research imagining that I had a good understanding of the relationship between childrens outside interests and how, at times, those interests conflicted with school goals. My recent teaching experience in a nearby elementary school serving predominantly African American children had alerted me to the tensions between the language arts curriculum and childrens overwhelming interest in popular culture, specifically hip-hop. On one hand, my students parents demanded that their children learn academic literacies that would prepare them for higher grade levels, a perspective echoed and explored in scholarly positions (e.g., Delpit, 1988). On the other hand, the children demanded that literacy not suck or be boring. My teaching experience, however, had been in homogeneous inner-city contexts. I had little experience with a classroom populated by racially and economically diverse elementary-age children. Consequently, during data collection, I had to widen my lens and refocus on how children experienced schooling differently in a diverse setting.
Data Collection
When I began the data collection, I observed all day, every day for 2 weeks to understand the rhythm of the classroom and the writing schedule. After the first 2 weeks, I observed only during lunch and the language arts block, and sometimes during recessall of which took place from roughly between 11:45 a.m. and 2:45 p.m. Consistent with qualitative methods (Patton, 2002), I collected several types of data: field notes, audiotapes, interviews, work samples, sociometrics, and web site data. Daily collection offered the opportunity to observe across different literacy events: composing, editing, conferring, researching, and performing. I analyzed interactions
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between peers and the teacher within those events to find where the boundaries resided between literacy, language, and rap. I paid special attention to instances when the boundaries were explicitly enforced or relaxed. To answer my question of how classroom-writing practices defined boundaries for language, literacy, and rap, I audiorecorded the students interactions with their teacher and one another during every observation. Audiorecording afforded me the freedom to focus on written and gestural communication, in addition to spoken words. I transcribed each audiotape word for word and embedded the transcripts within my observational notes. In the transcripts, I did not try to represent the students accented rhythms and cadences; however, I did maintain the grammatical structures the children used when they spoke. In addition, because my research questions investigated textual boundaries, I collected works samples both as the students wrote as well as after they completed each written piece. In all, I collected more than 900 work samples from the entire class. Since I wanted to document the development of each piece of writing, I collected students notes, drawings, rough drafts, outlines, as well as the final copies. Focal students. Since my larger research questions examined how the childrens peer worlds shaped writing practices and what the consequences were for students across different peer groups, I focused on two pairs of girls and two pairs of boys about half way through the studyeight students total. Focal pairs provided access into most friendship and desk groups. The focal pairs also represented a variety of ability levels. One female pair, Rachel and Felicia, was White and high achieving,4 as judged by the teacher; the other pair was African American with one high achiever, Aqueenah, and one low achiever Synchro. One male pair consisted of two perceived midachievers, Ron, a White boy and Rayjon, an African American boy. The other male pair consisted of Joey, who was South Asian and Shakeel who was African American. Both were perceived as the lowest achievers. Several, but not all of the focal students appear in this article. While I reference other students in this article, I zero in particularly on how Ron, Rayjon, Synchro, and Aqueenah negotiated rap within classroom poetry and how their cases generalized in representative ways to the work of those within their friendship groups.
Data Analysis and Developing Coding Categories

Data analysis began from the beginning of data collection and entailed constant comparison and grounded theory approaches (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). I used Dysons (1993) definition, which defines a literacy event as
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an activity engaged in by at least one person (the focal child) involving the use of graphic media (print, drawing) for some purpose and viewed by the child as a reading or writing activity (even if an adult might consider it drawing or playing. (p. 27) As I began to notice the children using rap music, I broadened my initial definition to include not only graphic, but also multimedia tools. To analyze my data, I began with an open coding procedure, searching for recurring patterns, themes, and writing topics (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Popular culture emerged as a pervasive theme. To assess whether themes were representative (Miles & Huberman, 1994) and trustworthy (Lincoln & Guba, 1985), at the beginning of each weeks data collection I sought out disconfirming evidence, which either refined my themes or altered them. Through selective coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) within the event, I identified more than 300 verbal references to popular culture. Within the theme of popular culture, rap emerged as a frequent topic. I coded for all of the instances when the children discussed rap, rappers, and hip-hop as well as when they claimed to use the aesthetics of rap music. Of the 900 work samples, about 230 included references to rap or used rap in their schoolwork. Axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) of rap generated examples of antihybridity and restricted hybridity that occurred through negotiations between the students and Mr. Mitchell. Using my analytic language and the data, I formulated assertions that helped me conceptualize how writing practices defined literacy boundaries for hybridity and how the children used negotiated hybridity to work within and against those boundaries. In the sections that follow, I provide data that illustrates how the children used hybridity to negotiate rap into the writing curriculum.
Findings
The representative data excerpts presented in the findings section illustrate how Mr. Mitchells curriculum promoted a conscribed and limited use of rap music in the writing curriculum. Mr. Mitchell very much subscribed to the one-way bridge approach. He was interested in rap only insofar as it helped accomplish the curricular goals upholding canonical poetry. The children, however, would not abide by such limitations, and used rap poem hybrids to create a space for rap in the classroom, thus smuggling in their own literary and cultural references whenever possible.
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The fifth-grade students struggled with the ideological tension between the district-approved curriculum, parent expectations, and their own writing interests. Even though Mr. Mitchell disagreed with many district policies on writing and reading, he still abided by the state standards and districtwide curricular mandates. What is more, negotiating noncanonical language forms into official classroom writing tasks was difficult because parents and administrators were not always supportive. According to Mr. Mitchell, during parentteacher conferences, one parent insisted that the children could learn about rap at home and that his job was to teach them how to write. In spite of parental and administrative pushback, Mr. Mitchell maintained fairly negotiable curricular boundaries. His negotiability, however, had limits.
Antihybrid Ideologies: Rap Music and Classroom Poetry

The section that follows explores the first research question guiding the present study: Research Question 1: How does Mr. Mitchells writing pedagogy differentiate rap from literacy? The first data excerpt illustrates how Mr. Mitchell differentiated rap from canonical texts, thus delegitimizing rap in relation to other texts. The second data excerpt shows how Mr. Mitchell limited rap more than other popular music by critiquing rap for its use of violence and vulgarity.
Rap vs. Poetry OR Tupac Shakur vs. Emily Dickinson

After having spent 1 month studying metaphors, cinquains, haiku, and other poetic forms as part of the district-approved language arts curriculum, the children were preparing to read poems at an Open House event. During one Writers Workshop session, two female African American students, Aqueenah and Synchro, approached Mr. Mitchell (Mr. M.) with a proposal: Synchro: Me and Aqueenah want to do a rap song at back to school night. Mr. M.: You mean open house? Aqueenah and Synchro: Yeah. Mr. M.: What are you going to rap? Synchro: You dont know itits by Tupac.
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Mr. M.: Well if I dont know it, then you cant show it. Synchro: Aw. Mr. Mitchell . . . Aqueenah: Forget it girl, lets go. (Aqueenah pulls at Synchros arm to walk away from Mr. Mitchell). He gonna let them other people do they rap and you should have known he was going to say no to us. Mr. M.: First of all, I have to look at the words to see if they are appropriate; second of all, you are supposed to be showing something that you made up, not something somebody else made up. Youre supposed to be learning something here. Synchro: PLEASE, Mr. Mitchell. You letting Ron and Rayjon rap their poem. (Synchro is referring to a rap poem jointly written by Ron and Rayjon, titled Kickboxing Grandmas.) Mr. M.: Thats cuz they made theirs up. Synchro: How about we say our poem and then we rap. Mr. M.: Sorry, I cant do it. As the data illustrates, Mr. Mitchell offered Aqueenah and Synchro a compromiseto write a rap for Open House. With this compromise, Mr. Mitchell created the boundary for a restricted hybridity. In this case, the restriction was that the poem must be student-created. The girls declined the opportunity, and in so doing expressed that they could not be co-opted for the assignment. To be clear, the girls had already written several poems during Writers Workshop, so they were not using Mr. Mitchells refusal to excuse themselves from writing. However, because the students were in effect preparing to perform, they asked Mr. Mitchell to relax the performance requirements to include poems or songs written by other writersrappers so that they could show their parents and friends their performed version of Tupacs raps. Mr. Mitchell was unwilling to include raps composed outside of the classroom. Similarly, the girls were disinterested in writing a rap poem of their own to perform. Both Mr. Mitchells and the girls standpoints illustrate how proponents of academic writing and rap might resist hybridization and rely on the concept of antihybrid to maintain their definition (Freedman, 1997). Aqueenah and Synchro voiced offense to Mr. Mitchells censorship and saw his action as an attack on their values and culture because Tupac Shakur, born and raised in the East Bay, represented their idealsomeone who held close and strong to African American values, celebrated the strength and struggle of the inner city, while also becoming a major media success. Aqueenah, in fact, shared that she perceived Mr. Mitchells focus on the negative things about Tupac to be racist. Her perception was based on the
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fact that on one occasion he once referred to Tupac as a gangsta rapper and that on another occasion he asked the girls why they would want to listen to rap music, which he characterized as filled with lyrics that degrade women. When I spoke to Mr. Mitchell after class on the day Aqueenah and Synchro approached him, he seemed confident that Tupacs raps would have included language inappropriate for a parent performance. He also pointed out that the assignment was not to perform a rap, but rather, to write and recite a poem authored by the students themselves. His justification came into question the following day, when Ellen stood up during authors chair to recite the poem she planned to share at the Open House: Ellen: I have two poems. The first one is by Emily Dickinson. It is called If I can stop one heart from breaking and the second one is mine and it is called Spring. If I can stop one Heart from breaking I shall not live in vain If I can ease one Life the Aching Or cool one Pain Or help one fainting Robin Unto his Nest again I shall not live in Vain. Ellens recital of Emily Dickinsons poem prompted Aqueenah to look at Synchro across the room. The two raised their eyebrows at one another. Later they told me that Mr. Mitchell was being racist by not letting them perform Tupac, yet allowing Ellen to recite a piece she had not written. Mr. Mitchell, for his part, did not explain to the class why Ellen was allowed to recite a poem that was not her own. He did tell me later, however, that Ellen is a voracious reader and he permitted her recital because Emily Dickinsons poetry would help parents see some of the quality pieces in the poetry unit. Ellens choice was, in effect, a legitimate form of cultural capital, because Dickinsons work is part of the literary canon; it posed no threat to the poetic forms students were learning, a fact that Ellen understood given her own upbringing (Bourdieu, 1977). As Bourdieu (1977) argues, the constitutive power which is granted to ordinary language lies not in the language itself but in the group which authorizes it and invests it with authority (p. 21). Parents, administrators, and Mr. Mitchell recognized Dickinson as an accepted canonical author. Consequently, Mr. Mitchell chose to ignore the rule about student authorship, and in so doing, reinforced the power of the
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traditional canon with a restricted hybridity (Garcia Canclini, 1995). He allowed hybridization as long as hybridity did not disrupt the official school goals. By applying rules to rap and not to canonical texts, Mr. Mitchell delegitimized rap as a valid and respected classroom textual form.
Cultural RelevanceWhose Culture?

The use of rap music during poetry was problematic not only when compared to canonical poetry, like that of Emily Dickinson, but also when compared to other poetic music. During one writing event, Mr. Mitchell assigned the students to choose their favorite author to write an original poem using a technique called stylistic imitation. Using their own theme or topic, the students were to imitate the style of their favorite poet. However, Mr. Mitchell restricted the definition of authorship to exclude rap artists by claiming that they have nothing new to offer. Consider the following exchange between Mr. Mitchell, Joey, and Shakeel: Mr. M.: OK guys, whos your favorite author. Who do you want to study? Joey: Im going to do Snoop Dogg and Shakeel is going to do Dr. Dre. Shakeel: Yeah, Im going to do Dr. Dre. But dont worry, we gonna bring the clean version. Mr. M.: You guys are killing me. I cant let you write a stylistic imitation of Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. Shakeel: Why not? The other um um day, you said rap was like poetry, so how come we cant use them? Mr. M.: Ugh. You guys already know about Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. You are supposed to come to school to learn something new. You can do that at home. Plus I cant let you copy the style of convicted gang members. I just cant do it. Thats not why you are in school. While Mr. Mitchell considered rap to be similar to poetry, he held strong judgment claims against particular rap artists, which he excluded from the curriculum. He based his exclusion on two assertions. First, he characterized the rap songs of Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre as the work of convicted gang members and, thus, he deemed it unsuitable for students. Yet the truth of the matter is that only Snoop Dogg had been an active gang member and convicted of a crime. Second, according to Mr. Mitchell, rap was something that students could learn about outside of school, a fact that is true of almost all subject matter.
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In contrast, negotiations with other students, demonstrated how Mr. Mitchell did not always uphold those two criteria. Consider the following exchange with Felicia: Mr. M.: OK Felicia, what do you have? Felicia: Well I cant decide between Bob Dylans Like a Rolling Stone or Blowing in the Wind. My parents have both of them on CDs at home and I can copy down the words to get the style in case you dont know the words. Mr. M.: Ah . . . The great Bob Dylan. Either one is fine. I bet you can find the words online. Mr. Mitchell allowed Felicia to use the great Bob Dylans songs as her stylistic imitation poetry even though Felicia was not bringing something new to learn at school and even though some of Snoop Doggs musical texts include social critiques much like many of Bob Dylans songs. In this regard, Bob Dylans political overtones seemed more palatable to Mr. Mitchell and more legitimate than Snoop Doggs social commentaries. I contrast the two events to highlight the openness with which Mr. Mitchell included Bob Dylan and the way that rap music identities were contested and restricted. The conflicts and restrictions were rooted in anti-hip-hop ideologies, which served to delegitimize rap as a valid text even when compared with other popular texts. Newkirk (2007) finds that adults display anxiety toward popular media culture that may not reflect their own life experiences. The two data excerpts above demonstrate Mr. Mitchells disapproval of rap artists and his reverence for canonical poets and musicians like Emily Dickinson and Bob Dylan. Seemingly, undergirding his apprehension was his belief that urban popular culture does not belong to official school life and that its admission might even threaten the legitimacy of the accepted canon. However, many of the children in Mr. Mitchells classroom persisted in their attempts to negotiate the inclusion of artists and textual forms that occupied their playful literary imaginations, even if they were not school sanctioned. Their persistence highlights the different values and ideological tensions that revolved around control of language, topic, lifestyle, and message.
Restricted-Hybridities: Negotiating Rap and Classroom Poetry

As illustrated by Aqueenah, Synchro, and Ellen above, Mr. Mitchell taught students a particular kind of poetryone bound mostly by canon and genre. Like all genres, this schooled poetry was knit together with specific
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points of view, specific approaches, forms of thinking, nuances and accents (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 289). The authority vested in the poetry genre represented western literary civilization, institutionalized and reinforced, for example, with the study of Emily Dickinson. Popular culture icons such as Bob Dylan also represented values and points of view that the teacher thought were great. However, the diverse children in Mr. Mitchells classroom had studied their own artists and poets and had their own points of view, approaches, thinking, nuances, and accents. They were not easily dissuaded from their own textual pursuits. They negotiated with Mr. Mitchell to incorporate their interests into the school curriculum. Negotiated-hybridity was the process by which the students wrestled with Mr. Mitchell over tensions between rap and canonical school literacies. The sections that follow address the second research question: Research Question 2: How did Mr. Mitchells fifth-grade students attempt to incorporate rap into classroom writing? The first section spotlights how children negotiated a space for rap in the classroom by appropriating the language of school literacy to create rap poem hybrids that justified raps inclusion. The second section shows how the children used performative dimensions of rap to hybridize the classroom space to make it more welcoming to the improvisational, vernacular, and stylized dimensions of rap.
Negotiated Hybridity: Making It Sound Like School

The childrens negotiations reveal how rap use was restricted. Consistent with Calkins writing workshop model (1994), Mr. Mitchell encouraged students to write about their lives, and what they cared about the most, except with regard to particular kinds of popular culture, such as rap. During writing time and on several other occasions, such as free time or class party time, the children asked Mr. Mitchell if they could bring professional rap music and rap lyrics into the classroom to analyze, listen to, and perform. The students offered to provide the clean versions of the music to ensure that inappropriate language did not result in a problem with administrators and parents. Invariably, Mr. Mitchells first response was no, thus restricting the use of rap in the classroom. However, not all children would take no for an answer and, on occasion, Mr. Mitchell would negotiate a compromise. Consider the following exchange that occurred as the children were writing articles for their school newspaper:
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Felicia: Yeah. Well we [Rachel and I] want to write a Whats In article for our article. And Um we want to use TLC.5 Mr. M.: No. Felicia and Rachel: Wait wait wait Mr. Mitchell. Why not? Mr. M.: Because I want you to write about whats in. Felicia and Rachel: We are, but TLC is in and we want to use the words from their songs. And they are a really cool all girl band and in. Well put other stuff in too. Mr. M.: No. You can write about them, but you cant copy them. Felicia: But well use quotation marks. Mr. M.: No. Felicia: Ugh. OK. How about we put it in our words and then write their words. Mr. M.: Say more. Im not convinced. Felicia: Well um. Like first we could write whats in and then we could write what they say in quotes. Mr. M.: Try if first and show me an example. Strong negotiators like Felicia could often convince Mr. Mitchell to allow rap into the writing curriculum. I speculate that Felicia had an easier time, because she was highly gifted, and produced excellent class work. Her negotiations were also aided by the fact that she used the style and punctuation tools of school to justify the use of rap lyrics in her newspaper article. Still, Mr. Mitchell routinely rejected the students initial proposals, especially those coming from middle to low achievers, like Joey and Shakeel. Mr. Mitchell was far more willing to negotiate entry for rap that the students themselves had written. Yet, even then, he would only legitimize rap if it sound[ed] like poetry and was evaluated by the criterion of poetry. As a result, Ron and Rayjon opted to negotiate their own rap poem hybrid using the analytic language shared by both rap and poetry: Ron: This stinks. This is so boring. Mr. M.: Well this is our poetry unit and so thats what we do. We write poetry. Ron: I dont want to write that kind of poetry. Its boring. Mr. M.: Well why dont you write poetry youre interested in. Rayjon: Can we write a rap song instead? Mr. M.: As long as it sounds like poetry.
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Strict genre interpretation created tastes for or against certain popular forms (Newkirk, 2002). So, when Ron responded with that kind of poetry he challenged the value that schooling placed on certain tastes, such as those represented in canonical texts. What is more, the boys phrase, thats boring, captures the extent to which the students perceived canonical institutional forms to exist outside of cultural and popular interests, such as rap music (Jocson, 2006; Morrell, 2002). The boys used the threat of boredom and disengagement (This stinks. This is so boring,) to negotiate and press Mr. Mitchell for permission to write their hybrid text. While Mr. Mitchell sought to control their poems, the boys were able to redefine the assignment within certain parameters. Mr. Mitchell let them write a rap because, as he told me later, its close enough to the expected product and he thought that it was the only way that he could get them to complete the assignment. In the end, by negotiating what counts for poetry, the boys produced a rap poem hybrid. Ron and Rayjons rap poem stood in sharp contrast to canonical poems about nature produced by their peers. After defining the boundaries of their kind of poetry, Ron and Rayjon began writing. They found a picture of an elderly couple in clip art and decided they wanted to write about the woman, who they dubbed the Kickboxing Grandma. Rayjon: . . . This hecka funny. Ron: Yeah, check out them glasses. Rayjon: Hey I think she with a Black man. Ron: She cool. We should write a poem about her. Rayjon: We cant write no poem about her. Ron: Yeah. Yeah we can. We can make her a kickboxing grandma. Rayjon: You crazy. That aint no poem. Even though Ron and Rayjon received conditional approval to create write a rap that sounds like a poem, Rayjon continued to refer to the emerging piece as a poem. His reference, which articulates the genre boundaries that the children wrote within, led Rayjon to conclude that writing a poem about kickboxing grandmas was absurd or crazy. Yet it is quite possible that he would have reacted differently if he had conceptualized the assignment as the writing of a rap. Ron and Rayjon began to compose using rhyme, a literary device common to both rap and writing:
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Ron: We can make it one [poem]. Kick Boxing Grandmas theyre really cool . . . Rayjon: they can whoop on anybody up in the school. Ron: Hey thats tight! Lets put it down. Rayjon: (types what they just said) Is this a poem? Ron: It rhymes dont it? Mr. M.: Hey, lets see what youve got. (reads their first two lines). This is good. What could your next stanza start with? Ron: They make good food. Rayjon: Like Fried chicken so dont mess around up in their kitchen. Ron: If you do youll get a licken. Ha Ha! Write it down. Rayjon: Thats tight! (types what they have said) Mr. Mitchell used literary terms, such as stanza (What could your next stanza start with), to force the connection between the analytics of rap and poetry. By using the formal analytic language of poetry, Mr. Mitchell reminded the boys that their authorial voice had to stay within the bounds of what counted as poetry at school and not to venture too far into using the analytic language of rapbeats, counts, flow, and rhythm. Using canonical poetry as the dominant paradigm, Mr. Mitchell controlled both the aesthetics of the rap and the analytic language used to discuss it. Nonetheless, the boys resisted full institutional control. In creating their rap poem, they combined the vernacular semantics of rap (e.g., whoop, motha, brotha) with rhyming couplets and stanzasfeatures shared by both rap and canonical poetry. Rayjons questionIs this a poem?and Rons responseIt rhymes dont it?reveal the boys awareness of a central problem in Mr. Mitchells classroom: the tension between literary and the popular. The boys understood this tension and set out to construct a text that satisfied the requirements of poetry. They knew that if they could write a poem-like rap, then they could make a curricular place for their work. Having used literary language opportunistically to negotiate the use of rap within school, the boys then negotiated the language of rap with the language of schooled writing. Through rap, the boys expressed their intellectual creativity and resisted reproducing institutional values. At every step, the boys, Rayjon in particular, articulated anxiety about the authority of the institution. They knew that they were being called on to produce a text that Mr. Mitchell would define as a poem.
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Hybridity,Vernacular, and Performance

Rap music in Mr. Mitchells classroom was tolerated only insofar as it represented and reflected some of the dominant characteristics of canonical poetry, such as imagery, meter, and stress. The inclusion of rap often served as a motivational compromise that Mr. Mitchell used to get students to satisfy writing assignments. In the excerpt that follows, Mr. Mitchell capitulates to Rons request to write a rap poem about his cartoon drawing entitled Mo the Snail: Ron: Can I write a rap about him. Hes tight. Mr. M.: Ron. I already let you make this cartoon. Now start with your poem or else. (starts to walk away) Ron: Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Mitchell. Listen up. Ill make it sound like a poem, Tupac style. Mr. M.: No, Ron, get busy. Ron: Man, this bites. I dont want to write no poem. Mr. M.: Whats the difference? You have to write them both out anyway dont you? Rayjon: (joins the conversation) So whats the difference Mr. Mitchell? Ron: Yeah. Whats the difference? Mr. M.: The difference is that when you write it like a rap, your poems dont make sense. You are always clowning. You dont take the assignment seriously. Ron: Thats what I likeclowning (Ron says this loudly for others to hear). I dont like those serious love poems or those poems that make you feel like all sad and stupid and stuff. Please Mr. Mitchell, Ill make it rhyme and everything. Mr. M.: You know Ron, poetry isnt only about rhyming. What have I taught you all semester? What about imagery and meter and stresses? Ive got to help Joey and Shakeel. They have been waiting for me. (starts to walk away) Ron: So can I do it? Mr. M.: Ill leave it up to you Ron, but Id prefer that you write a poem that makes sense. Rons negotiations with Mr. Mitchell illustrate Mr. Mitchells perception that rap is not as serious or school-worthy as canonical poetry. He viewed rap as a compromise, like allowing Ron to draw a cartoon before writing. When
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the boys pressed him to identify the difference between rap and poetry, Mr. Mitchell did not address the literary features of each genre. Instead, he critiqued the childrens authorial intents when they wrote raps. According to Mr. Mitchell, they did not approach their schoolwork in earnest but instead used their writing as a way to clown around. Writing a rap, Mr. Mitchell argued, did not demonstrate what he had taught the students about imagery, meter, and stresses. Traditional canonical works bored Ron and made him disconnect from writing. However, when he wrote rap poems, he was able to meld together the analytic language of school poetry with the aesthetics and practices of rap. As a result, unlike most students in the class, Ron was willing to suffer bad grades for altering poetry assignments to include rap. Consider, for example, the following excerpt in which Mr. Mitchell was circulating the room checking on student progress when he came to Rons desk: Mr. M.: So, what did we decide? Ron: Well, WE decided to write a rap about Mo the Mac Daddy snail. (Looks over at Rayjon and they both start laughing) Mr. M.: You cant use Mac Daddy in your rap. It is offensive. Rayjon: Yeah man. Its sexual harassment. (starts laughing) Ron: Shut up man. I aint sexually harassing nobody, especially no snail. (both boys laugh) Mr. M.: Let me see what you have so far. (reads aloud) His name is Mo, hes got lots of dough. Hes really tite, plus he sells dynamite. See Ron, this doesnt make sense. What does tite mean? Remember how poetry is about showing and not telling? And why is he selling dynamite? Do snails sell dynamite? Ron: Ugh. Poems dont have to be real. I was trying to make an image of a supertite snail. Hes selling illegal dynamite. Plus plus plus I used rhymes and meter. Mr. M.: OK Ron. Tite doesnt tell me anything. Fix it. Ill let you rap this time because you are working, but next time I want to see that youve learned something.
Mo The Snail
His name is mo He got lots of dough Hes really tite Plus he sells dynamite
1160 Since he is a snail He gets lots of threatening salt in the mail Now he got body guards They stop him from eating lards OH, NO they put him in a maze. OH Shucks he fell in a vat of glaze.
Rons rap poem is a hybrid of aesthetics drawn from rap and from traditional poetry. First, it uses the vernacular of rap, such as dough (i.e., money), tite (i.e., stylish/cool), to create imagery emphasizing the antiestablishment and materialistic messages expressed in many rap songs. Second, Rons rap poem incorporates daily life to make popular culture and the mundane into an art form, which is one of the discursive characteristics of rap music. By introducing the idea that Mo got threatening salt in the mail, Ron alluded to the nationwide Anthrax scare over the previous 6 months when people throughout the country were receiving poisonous packages. Rap is not only about lyrics, but also performativity (Weinstein, 2006). As a result, aside from the use of structural and literary devices, Ron also sought out performance opportunities for his rap poem hybrids. Throughout his composing process, he had planned for a performance at the Parents Open House: Ron: Im done. But Im only gonna say it if I can rap. Mr. M.: Sounds good. Ill give you a beat. (Mr. Mitchell cups his hands and gives a background beat sound.) Rons proclamation that he would only share his rap poem if he could rap illuminates how children perceive the purpose of their rap poems differently from the purpose of traditional classroom poetry. The discourse of rap, like other discourses, is a sort of identity kit which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular social role that others will recognize (Gee, 1996, p. 127). For the students, rap included not only verbal poetics, but also nonverbal aesthetics, such as stylized dress and gestures. Rap was also a language medium for receiving props or recognition from peers. Recognition was linked to creativity, entertainment, as well as the literary transgressions that result from the stylistic choices associated with rap, such as the inclusion of vernacular language. The performativity of rap necessitates a consideration of audience, venue, and communicative context different from literary works. Authorial and creative expectations
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vary greatly from printed text, making it a different kind of literacy. Weinstein (2006) makes the distinction that rap is performed to a beat and writing [is] intended to be read on the page (p. 270). Still, while rap music ideologies link it closely to oral and musical traditions (traditionally excluded from literacy), the poetics of rap music are also found in more literary texts (e.g., rhyming, stanzas, etc.). Ultimately, peers value and proffer props for those communicative modes enacted outside of schooling. While poetry can also have some of these same social purposes, the children perceived its possibilities as much more limited. By including a rap poem in a parent-night production, Ron sought to hybridize the performativity of space, aesthetic, and ritual.
Conclusion
Using a sociocritical frame and the analytic tools of hybridity theory, this article examined how fifth-grade children sought to negotiate curricular boundaries differentiating rap and literacy during classroom writing, and how they created rap hybrids when their teacher, Mr. Mitchell, allowed them to do so. Mr. Mitchells literature-driven Writers Workshop differentiated rap music from canonical texts because of literacy boundaries stressed by standardbased curricula. Differentiation created contested textual boundaries that resulted in negotiated rap poem hybrids. Those negotiations revealed points of contention related to language, message, and authorship. The first point of contention was inappropriate language. Mr. Mitchell took an antirap stance because he could not allow profanity, as evidenced by Aqueenah and Synchros exchange. Similarly, Joey and Shakeel offered to use the clean versions of Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dres work, demonstrating their understanding that Mr. Mitchell prohibited music lyrics that included curse words. The second point of contention was the use of popular vernacular versus the use of Standard American English. Mr. Mitchell would often comment on popular vernacular uses of English (e.g., tite). He encouraged the students to use showing words (descriptive adjectives) to create imagery. Rap, however, accomplishes imagery through the use popular vernacular language and reference to common archetypes and practices, such as MacDaddy and whoop. Mr. Mitchell worried that the language of rap did not support the language arts goals of Standard American English. Another point of contention was the perception that all rap depicted an unacceptable sexist gangster lifestyle. Mr. Mitchell did not want Joey and Shakeel to emulate the style of two gangsta rappers. In addition, he forbade
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Ron from using the term MacDaddy to describe Mo, because he thought it sexist. Mr. Mitchells antirap position stands in contrast to his unquestioned acceptance of Bob Dylan. The fourth tension that played during negotiations had to do with the requirements that all poems should be linked to standardized learning outcomes and that they are student-created. These requirements were used to restrict Joey and Shakeel from employing the works of Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, which did not represent new school learning. Similarly, Aqueenah and Synchro could not use Tupacs work during the poetry recitation because it was not their own. However, Mr. Mitchells requirement turned out to be a red herring, as he allowed Ellen to share the work of Emily Dickinson. In addition, Felicia and Rachel were able to incorporate excerpts from TLC into their school newspaper article entitled, Whats in. Overall, the limitations on rap use in the classroom were the result of Mr. Mitchell placing more emphasis on problematic aspects of rap than on the linguistic artistry and poetic performativity of the artists and the genre. To be fair, Mr. Mitchell had to contend with the concerns of parents and the school principal, all of whom varied in their opinions on rap. Students engaged Mr. Mitchell in strong negotiations to make a place for rap in the literacy curriculum. Those negotiations illuminated the degree to which textual hybridity is restricted and controlled by canonical definitions of literacy and by literature-driven pedagogical choices. For Mr. Mitchell, rap was only helpful insofar as it served to help motivate students and build bridges or scaffolds to canonical texts; rap music was not a text for official classroom study. The rap poems represented compromise between the goals of school and the childrens interest in out of school texts. Kickboxing Grandmas, for example accomplished some of the goals of canonical poetry with the use of popular vernacular, but did not explore themes (e.g., nature) and forms (e.g., haiku) that the children had been studying in class. Restricted hybridity and anti hybridity represented institutional authority and the possibility that not all student attempts at using rap could be successful. Mr. Mitchell and his students can shed light on the four approaches for utilizing rap in the classroom outlined in the literature review. The data suggests that Mr. Mitchell conceptualized rap as a bridge or scaffold to school literacy by restricting the use of rap to that which was student created and by making sure that rap poems sounded like poetry. However, the bridge and scaffold approaches target teachers and do not account for child intentionality or aims, which may not necessarily align with those of school literacy. Instead, the childrens use of rap demonstrated how they attempted to hybridize classroom writing by introducing culturally relevant literacies and youth popular culture through their rap poem hybrids and performances.
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I describe negotiations that restricted literacy hybrids, not to indict Mr. Mitchell, for negotiating student interests into a standards-based curriculum is no easy task in an accountability era. Instead, I show the childrens negotiations to demonstrate how canonical literature-driven writing models (Calkins & Oxenhorn, 2005) and content standards that exclude childrens popular and cultural texts can serve as language obstacles rather than language models. Canon-driven Writers Workshop pedagogies promote literature models that reproduce a nostalgic Norman Rockwell version of childhood that few, if any, children experience (Newkirk, 2007, p. 543). As a result, writing pedagogy that excludes the textual resources of urban children my result in moments of frustration, as when Aqueenah and Sychro questioned why Ellen was able to read Emily Dickinson aloud when they were not allowed to read a Tupac Shakurs rap. Experiencing such moments of frustration may in turn lead students to disengage from school. Writing pedagogies and language arts content standards must not stand as obstacles for diverse children during classroom writing. Pedagogies and standards must offer children the opportunity to explore different forms, functions, and aesthetics. The data show how children in Mr. Mitchells classroom used hybridity to make such explorations as they drew from textual material, such as rap, canonical poetry, folk songs, and newspapers. The children demonstrated that writing pedagogies must include an array of writing models from diverse cultural and popular sources. What is more, students and teachers could benefit from dialoguing about what counts as text, whose criteria matter, for which audiences, and for what purposes. Through such discussions, students and teachers can not only learn about existing curricular boundaries but also redefine the learning space so that students come to embrace the writerly life both in and out of school. While this study is limited to one classroom and one grade level, the data begin to address the gap in the literature exploring elementary school childrens use of rap music during writing. The findings in this study also suggest the need for further research. As is evident in the data analysis, Mr. Mitchells pedagogy was affected by the institutional pressures of standard-based curriculum. There is more we need to know about how teachers go about reconciling the curricular demands with what they believe is pedagogically best, and their students interests. In addition, the data shows that Mr. Mitchell negotiated rap into the curriculum differently depending on the academic abilities of the students who were negotiating with him. We could benefit from better understanding of how curricular negotiations between teachers and students vary depending on how teachers and students perceive one another. Similarly, additional research on how students attempt to negotiate
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their interests into curricular assignments can shed light on how to improve their academic engagement. Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.
Notes
1. Tupac Shakur was the son of former Black Panther, Afeni Shakur. Before his violent death, he was a controversial rap artist known for his run-ins with law enforcement. Though some of his lyrics have curse words, not all do. 2. In their lyrics, rap groups Dead Prez and KRS-1 critique public schools for excluding children of color by teaching a Eurocentric curriculum. 3. All district, school, teacher, and student names have been changed to pseudonyms to protect them from unwanted exposure. 4. High-achiever status was marked by admission to the gifted and talented program. Midachievers were not gifted and performed average on standardized exams and class work. Low-achiever status was often marked by special needs status or low test scores. 5. TLC was an R&B and Hip-Hop group that consisted of Lisa Left Eye Lopes, Rozonda Chilli Thomas, and Tionne T-Boz Watkins.
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Bio
Mary Christianakis, is an assistant professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture in the Department of Education at Occidental College. She serves on the editorial board of Teacher Education Quarterly. Her recent work focuses on multimodal semiotics and diverse childrens writing development. She can be reached at Department of EducationBooth 101, Occidental College, 1600 Campus Rd. Los Angeles, California 90041. Email: mary@oxy.edu.

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Urban Education http://uex.sagepub.

Hybrid Texts: Fifth Graders, Rap Music,and Writing

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Hybrid Texts: Fifth Graders, Rap Music, and Writing

Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA

Urban Education 46(5)

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Urban Education 46(5)

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Rap in the Classroom

Utilitarian Approaches to Rap and Literacy

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Urban Education 46(5)

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Critical Texts, Critical Pedagogy, and Rap

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Urban Education 46(5)

Hybridity, Literacy, and Rap

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Urban Education 46(5)

HybridityUnderstanding Power at the Center and Margins

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Table 1. Pedagogical Approaches to Rap in Classroom Literacy

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Urban Education 46(5)

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Urban Education 46(5)

Method Site,Teacher, and Students

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Role as Participant Observer

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Urban Education 46(5)

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Data Analysis and Developing Coding Categories

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Urban Education 46(5)

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Antihybrid Ideologies: Rap Music and Classroom Poetry

Rap vs. Poetry OR Tupac Shakur vs. Emily Dickinson

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Urban Education 46(5)

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Urban Education 46(5)

Cultural RelevanceWhose Culture?

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Restricted-Hybridities: Negotiating Rap and Classroom Poetry

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Urban Education 46(5)

Negotiated Hybridity: Making It Sound Like School

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Urban Education 46(5)

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Urban Education 46(5)

Hybridity,Vernacular, and Performance

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