Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s "Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom"

The part of this article that I found to be the most interesting was the section on teaching hip-hop music and culture in the classroom. In urban environments, things like hip-hop and rap have a tendency to be very popular. In the same places, education often suffers. It was phenomenal to read in this article about how they combined hip-hop with the English classroom in order to help students understand the material they were working with. Hip-Hop and rap are very frequently underappreciated, being considered by many to be of lower culture and not of any literary value. However, in reality they are of the same high culture as the more archaic literature that is found in a standard English classroom. Elevating something like rap or hip-hop which students enjoy and connect with and using it as a tool for them to work with in order to grasp the same material makes it much easier for them to complete the tasks and much more interested in actually doing the work in the first place. I would be ecstatic to adapt a lesson like this into my own classroom in the future.