Mindi R. Englart
Contents of Curriculum Unit
Narrative
Introduction
Special Considerations
A Bit about Rap Music
Unit Correlation with District Performance Standards
Strategies
Materials List
Classroom Activities (8-week curriculum)
Week One: Rap as Spoken Word Poetry-What is Poetry?
Week Two: Some Basic Technical Aspects of Poetry
Weeks Three and Four: Rap’s Poetic Relatives-Learning to Use Other Poetic Forms
Week Five: Hip Hop Party-Getting into the Groove
Week Six: The Power of Words-Battle Rapping
Week Seven: Finding your Voice and Getting Your Message out-The Last Poets
Week Eight: Crafting and Performing Your Poetry- Slam Poetry
Assessment
Annotated Bibliography (with online resources)
Acknowledgments
Glossary of Poetic Terms
Introduction
I have long been interested in rap music as a cultural expression of our times. Rap music shows us the world as seen through a particular (and continually changing and evolving) segment of American society-it is a form that is now being received by the population at large. I have always been astonished at the creative and novel use of language apparent in rap music. I remember thinking more than ten years ago, while listening to my first rap song: if this is not poetry, what is?
I work in the Creative Writing Department of Cooperative Arts and Humanities Magnet School. Being in a magnet school, our students take their traditional classes and also have a two-period (94 minute) “arts block” each day, wherein they focus on their chosen art. Students in the Creative Writing Department take a variety of courses, such as Screenwriting, Myth and Fantasy, Poetry, Short story, and Journalism. In the coming year, I will teach Journalism and Publishing & Portfolio.
As a magnet school, we have students bussed in from numerous towns in the Greater New Haven area. Our school has a majority of African American and Hispanic students. Many of my students listen to rap music. Young people naturally respond to the rhythms and rhymes in rap. They learn, sing, and dance to poetic structures without even knowing it! My intention is to work backward with them-to take the enthusiasm they have for rap and begin to show them how rap is actually an evolution of poetic form-to try to get them excited about structure, meaning, and creative expression. I intend to have students write and listen to rap songs, but also to engage them in the development of many forms of poetry, some of which may seem to them remarkably similar to rap.
My main goal is to make poetry relevant for students’ lives. As Salman Rushdie said in a 1990 speech, entitled “Is Nothing Sacred?” “…literature is an inquiry, great literature, by asking extraordinary questions, opens new doors in our minds.” I believe the task is to develop students’ ability to explore the world of feelings, perceptions, and ideas that poetry can bring to them.
But I want to take my students beyond form. I want to help my students understand how common themes in rap are indicative of the problems, as well as the empowerments, that can be seen in our urban cultures today. I want to teach students about poetic form and structure, so I can help them express their content in cohesive, clear, and meaningful ways. Students will be encouraged to develop their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills. This unit is also intended to encourage healthy and meaningful creative expression and to help students develop confidence and a voice with which to be active and empowered leaders in their communities and in their lives.
Special Considerations
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1. What is the relevance of this unit to students who are not interested in rap music (those who are interested in Goth, Techno, Rock, or other musical genres)? Though the unit is focused on rap as poetry, it can be argued that most music has poetic elements. There are a few exercises built into the unit that invite students to work with any lyrics they like, so different students won’t feel their interests are being minimized.
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2. Language and content of rap music. As I understand it, some schools permit contextual profanity to be discussed, but I’m sure many don’t. You can check with your administrator to be sure. You may want to send a permission slip out to parents at the beginning of the unit to let them know that you may be showing films or poems that have certain content or language. If you want to use specific songs that have troublesome words, you might choose to substitute asterisks for letters in inappropriate words (example: Isn’t this a f****** great way to get around swear words?). Though I won’t present any work in this unit that is considered inappropriate for high school students (in terms of swearing, misogyny, sexuality or extreme violence), I would suggest that you get this question out in the open with your students. Instead of talking about specific examples of “bad” language, talk about WHY the students think so many rappers use this type of stuff in their songs. This can become a good segue into the political issues behind rap and behind poetry of the past as well.
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3. What if students want to write raps (or anything) with questionable language or content in their journals, or to present or to hand in? Personally, I would encourage them to write whatever they like in their journals, knowing that I alone will see it. However, they should know that when they want to present work to the class or to hand work in to me for a grade, the work should follow the rules listed above (no swearing; no misogyny; no references to graphic violence or sex).
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4. Grade levels: Young people can go through quite a lot of maturation between their freshman and senior years of high school. Some of the exercises will work better with different ages of students. I’ll leave that up to each teacher to decide.
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5. Music in class: You may want to consider allowing students to play music as they do their writing assignments (if you and other students are comfortable with it, great; if not, perhaps students can use headphones) in order to keep them thinking about rhythm, etc. as they write.
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6. A lot to teach: You may find that eight weeks is not enough time to realistically introduce and teach all the material in this unit. You may choose to focus on certain activities and stretch them out if you have more than eight weeks, or you may choose to drop certain activities and focus on the ones you feel your students will benefit from most.
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7. Student knowledge of poetry: It will help if this unit is taught after students have a working knowledge of the basics of poetry. The unit will introduce some basic poetic elements, such as rhyme, rhythm, meter, repetition, symbols, similes, metaphors, allusions, alliteration, and assonance. If your students already have a working knowledge of these elements, they will be able more quickly to go about analyzing rap songs as poetry. If not, you may need to lengthen weeks one and two in order to teach more about the basics of poetry.
A Bit About Rap Music
When I began my research for this unit, I looked for the ways in which poetry helped to produce rap, but surprisingly, I found that most people feel that rap does not have direct roots in formal poetic forms and movements. However, most sources do acknowledge rap as a new poetic form (for example, see Handbook of Poetic Forms). While rap music did not necessarily get its start in the world of poetry, it does indeed have many similarities to a number of poetic forms, which lend themselves to exercises you will find in this unit. These exercises will allow you to use rap to expose your students to more traditional forms of poetry. As Tom Terrell states in The Vibe History of Hip Hop, “Revolutions-whether social, political or cultural-do not happen in a vacuum; they are in actuality the end products of a string of connect-the-dots factors and events.” Let’s examine some of these factors and events.
Rap vs. Hip Hop
First, let me attempt to define the words “rap” and “hip hop.” Kurtis Blow says: “Rap is talking in rhyme to the rhythm of a beat. Hip-hop is a culture, a way of life for a society of people who identify, love, and cherish rap, break dancing, DJing, and graffiti.” Tom Terrell says in The Vibe History of Hip Hop: “Hip Hop: Disturbing to the mind yet irresistible to da feet.”
A Brief History of Rap
The Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, and others spoke about African American and urban life with a percussion backdrop in the early 1970s. New York City, particularly Brooklyn and the Bronx, was home to a large Jamaican community. Jamaican DJ’s (DJ Kool Herc has been credited as the first) mixed sounds from several turntables. This became a rap trademark. The Sugarhill Gang popularized this technique with “Rapper's Delight” in 1979. Grandmaster Flash’s 1982 single, “The Message,” is considered by many to be one of the first rap songs. The Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash helped to get rap from the streets onto the radio. Blondie sang “Rapture” in 1989, pointing the way toward rap. Later, Run-D.M.C. collaborated with Aerosmith and brought rap to a wider (and whiter) audience. Then came the Beastie Boys, Russell Simmons, Def Jam records, Run-DMC, Eminem, and so many others who helped popularize the form.
Hip hop is said to be a reaction to the emptiness of disco, which came after blues, soul and funk. Of course, the beat (the drum) is an essential element in rap, and that beat comes from ancient and modern African traditions. There is no clear “history” of rap music, but rap may be said to have some of its roots in and connections to a number of oral traditions and poetic and musical movements. For instance, many cultures throughout history (such as Japanese battling haiku; French Bouts Rimés; and German spontaneous poetry competitions; British and American poetry slams) have used poetry in competitions, as do today’s “battle rappers.” In a battle rap, opponents use rap-style rhymes to insult each other.
Rap music has been compared with the oral tales told by African griots. As Senegalese musician and singer Baba Maal put it, a griot "listens and talks to the people and tells what is going on in the society, both the good and the bad." This is how a group of people can know their history. Rhythms, rhymes, and messages in rap can be successfully compared with the speeches of African American preachers and political activists, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, and Mohammed Ali. The Beat movement may also have been an influence in the development of rap, as both have a tendency toward autobiography and the confessional mode, filled with feeling and commentary about socio-political affairs that affected the poet’s generation.
Rap has some of its linguistic roots in street jive and in the words of the street poets of Brooklyn. The energy and some subject matter of blues and early rock and roll can also be detected in today’s rap songs. Some people credit The Last Poets as the first rappers, because they put their political messages into poetic form and set them to the sounds of congas and other percussive instruments. Rappers use a lot of word play and made-up words, as do poets. You can find the use of “ebonics” throughout rap (see “The Rap Dictionary” at to learn more). In terms of language, rappers often use “signifying” to communicate multileveled meanings in their work. Signifying has historically referred to the way in which subjected cultures develop a way of using the “masters’” language in order to gain independence, or a voice of their own. Signifying is a way people in a weak position play with language to trick more powerful people who will not understand the hidden meanings.
Freestyling (as improvisational rapping is called) can be compared with French theatrical tirades and tirades found in Shakespeare. You can find exaggerated, boastful rhetoric in Act 3; Scene 1 of Henry IV Part One, which can be compared with some of today’s rap lyrics. In addition, technological advancements have helped the form to grow quickly. For example, the advent of drum machines has made it relatively simple for rappers to add a rhythmic beat to their raps, and sampling equipment has allowed rappers to appropriate the work of others.
A Crash Course to Help You Prepare to Teach This Unit
If you’d like to learn more about rap music, I recommend “The Vibe History of Hip Hop.” To learn about slam poetry, watch the film “Slam Nation.” To refresh your knowledge of poetic terms and forms, read “The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Terms” by Ron Padgett, and “Poetry for Dummies” by The Poetry Center. For resources about beat poetry, The Last Poets, and more, see the Teachers Bibliography at the end of this unit.
Unit Correlation with District Performance Standards
This unit fulfills many parts of the following High School Academic Performance Standards as designed by the New Haven Public School System: Content Standard 1.1; 1.2;1.3; 2.1; 2.2; 3.1; 4.2; 6.2. Specifically, the unit is designed to help students:
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Participate in daily discussions relating to materials read.
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Develop language and communication skills.
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Compose narrative, personal and expressive selections, responses to selections read.
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Exhibit comprehension by responding to a variety of texts through oral, visual, artistic, musical and technological formats.
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Access, interpret and convey information.
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Read and comprehend text that is abstract and removed from personal experience.
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Read purposefully to make connections between separated sections of text.
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Recognize that many pieces of literature have multiple interpretations.
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Select and read materials about students’ multicultural heritage and traditions as well as those of other cultures.
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10. Recognize social and historical changes through their study of literature.
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11. View technology, media and other sources that reflect cultural and curriculum-related topics.
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12. Write daily and maintain a portfolio with their best work to demonstrate growth.
