Fall 2003 Issue
Article Abstracts:
Fall 2003 Reviews of Current Books (Full-Text)
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Harvard Educational Review
Fall 2003 Article Abstracts:
Popular Culture and Democratic Practice
Nadine Dolby
In this introduction to the study of popular culture in education, Nadine Dolby offers an insightful review of the literature informing this work. Her essay sets the tone and theme for this Special Issue, and begins to address why educators and educational researchers should pay particular attention to popular culture. Discussing the relevant literature and introducing readers to historical debates in the field, Dolby distinguishes between various understandings of popular culture and approaches to studying its relationship to education. Ultimately, Dolby argues, the importance of popular culture and its connection to education lies in the role it plays as a site for engaging in the process of democratic practice. She encourages educators to engage young people in a deep exploration of the multiple dimensions of popular culture and the public sphere, and highlights examples of this kind of engagement. (pp. 258-284)
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Merchants of Death: Media Violence and American Empire
David Trend
In this article, David Trend illuminates the centrality of violent narratives in U.S. popular culture. He describes the ubiquity of violent imagery and the popular discourse it has generated. Trend argues that research on media violence has created a large academic subculture that has done little to advance our understanding of who is watching violent media and why. He draws on multidisciplinary sources and calls for scholars to collaborate across fields to reframe the discussion. He concludes that the mass production of violent media may be wasting an enormous resource that might otherwise be used for tremendous public good. (pp. 285-308)
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Media Education and the End of the Critical Consumer
David Buckingham
In this article, David Buckingham addresses the challenges media educators face in dealing with postmodern media culture. Buckingham begins by outlining the nature of contemporary developments in children's media environments and how these relate to broader changes in their social status. He argues that these developments represent a fundamental challenge to the modernist project of media education, with its emphasis on the production of critical consumers. Buckingham then moves on to draw on his own empirical studies of media classrooms in the United Kingdom. He deals first with the issue of identity formation and the implications of current changes for teaching about representation. Second, he considers the role of play, particularly in relation to students' media production, and the potential limitations of a more ludic, or playful, approach. Buckingham then addresses the difficulties posed by students' use of parody, both ideologically and in terms of learning. Finally, he considers a more comprehensively postmodern approach to media pedagogy. Ultimately, Buckingham suggests that the modernist project cannot simply be abandoned by media educators, but that it does need to be comprehensively reconsidered in light of contemporary developments. (pp. 309-327)
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"Welcome to the Jam": Popular Culture, School Literacy, and the Making of Childhoods
Anne Haas Dyson
In this ethnographic study of a group of African American first graders, Anne Haas Dyson illustrates the textual processes - the deliberate manipulation of popular cultural material - involved in the children's shared practices as playful children and good friends. These same processes shaped the ways the children made sense of and began to participate in school literacy. The observed children did not approach official literacy activities in their classroom as though they had nothing to do with their own childhoods. They made use of familiar media-influenced practices and symbolic material to take intellectual and social action in the official school world. Dyson offers a fresh perspective on children's experiences with popular media, emphasizing that they are an integral aspect of contemporary childhoods, not an external threat. Moreover, she presents an alternative view of the pathways and mechanisms through which children enter into school literacy practices, one that illuminates how children build from the very social and symbolic stuff of their own childhoods. (pp. 328-361)
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Open Mics and Open Minds: Spoken Word Poetry in African Diaspora Participatory Literacy Communities
Maisha T. Fisher
In this article, Maisha T. Fisher explores the resurgence of spoken word and poetry venues in the Black community and their salience as venues for cultural identity development and literacy practice. Calling them African Diaspora Participatory Literacy Communities (ADPLCs), Fisher describes two open mic poetry settings that recall the feeling and communal centrality of jazz clubs and literary circles of the Harlem Renaissance. These ADPLCs are predominantly created and supported by people of African descent who actively participate in literacy-centered events outside of school and work settings. Through ethnographic research, Fisher explores how these venues function as literacy centers in two communities. Fisher discusses the cultural practices that underlie the organization and orchestration of these events, explores what inspires and motivates participants, and examines how these venues operate as sites for multiple literacies. (pp. 362-389)
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Foot Soldiers of Modernity: The Dialectics of Cultural Consumption and the 21st-Century School
Paul Willis
Drawing on more than twenty-five years of experience researching and theorizing about culture, youth, and society, Paul Willis presents a broad theoretical argument that positions the school as the site and instrument through which cultural responses to material conditions are played out. Willis distinguishes between three "waves of modernization" that stem from radical shifts in technological and material production and that are accompanied by specific cultural forms, particularly forms of youth culture. He argues that it is from these specific cultural forms that an effective struggle for social change can emerge. (pp. (390-415)
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Cultural Negotiations: Puerto Rican Intellectuals in a State-Sponsored Community Education Project, 1948-1968
Cati Marsh Kennerley
The Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico
(autonomous commonwealth), established in 1952, redefined the political
relationship between the United States and its colony. The ambiguous political
status — autonomy without sovereignty, self-government without
self-determination — created new social, political, and cultural
contradictions. The island’s first elected governor, Luis Muñoz
Marín, was committed to promoting an essentialized Puerto Rican culture
centered around the idealization of traditional rural life, while
simultaneously creating a new democratic citizenship, both of which would
bolster the new government’s legitimacy before its people. In this
article, Puerto Rican scholar Cati Marsh Kennerley explores the collective work
done by the División de Educación de la Comunidad
(DivEdCo), the government educational agency charged with promulgating
Muñoz Marín’s ideas about Puerto Rican culture and
citizenship. Marsh Kennerley draws from a wide variety of sources to
reconstruct an untold history, analyze its contradictions, obtain lessons from
DivEdCo’s negotiations, and point out its relevance for understanding
contemporary Puerto Rican culture. (pp. 416–448)
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Contesting Culture: Identity and Curriculum Dilemmas in the Age of Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Multiplicity
Cameron McCarthy, Michael Giardina, Susan Harewood, and Jin-Kyung Park
In this closing article, Cameron McCarthy, Michael Giardina, Susan Harewood, and Jin-Kyung Park draw on the preceding articles of this Special Issue to develop the argument that educators need to pay special attention to developments associated with human immigration, cultural globalization, and the rapid migration of cultural and economic capital and electronically mediated images. In the plurality of social and cultural sites of practice reflected in these articles, McCarthy et al. find implications for pedagogical practice and the educational preparation of school youth. They specifically address questions concerning the reproduction of culture, identity, and community as they relate to contemporary educational debates. Given this range of cultural practices, how should we address the topic of culture and identity in the organization of school knowledge? McCarthy et al. suggest that pedagogical interventions that privilege popular culture as a site of legitimate critique can open up new avenues of exploration and investigation to a radical, progressive democracy premised on the basic values of love, care, and equality for all humanity. (pp. 449-465) Back to Table of Contents
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Harvard Educational Review
Fall 2003 Reviews of Current Books
(Full Text)
Desis in the House: Indian
American Youth Culture in New York City
by Sunaina Marr Maira.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. 256 pp. $64.50, $19.95
(paper).
The Immigration Act of 1965 ended decades of restrictions
on Indian immigration to the United States. Since then, the population of
Indians living in the United States has grown from 50,000 to well over 1.5
million. Today, second-generation Indian Americans comprise a considerable
portion of Asian American youth (approximately 12%) in this country. Still, the
experience of Indian American young people has barely been documented,
particularly in urban areas where these youth have created their own culture
that fuses traditional elements of their pasts with modern elements of their
multicultural presents.
In Desis in the House, Sunaina Marr Maira presents
the results of an ethnographic study documenting the experiences of
second-generation Indian American youth in New York City. She asks the
following questions: “What are the meanings of this youth culture in the
lives of Indian American youth? How do Indian American youth negotiate
simultaneously the collective nostalgia for India (re)created by their parents
and the coming-of-age rituals of American youth culture?” (pp.
15–16). An assistant professor of Asian American studies, Maira has
experience researching the experience of South Asian immigrants to the United
States. In this study, she focuses on popular culture as a tool that enables
Indian American youth to negotiate and manage this tension between
“nostalgia” and “cool” in their attempts to shape and
assert their evolving identities.
Chapter one provides historical context about the
immigration of Indian Americans to the United States and outlines the
subsequent chapters. In chapter two, Maira explores the Manhattan “desi
scene.” She defines desi as “a colloquial term for someone
‘native’ to South Asia and one that has taken hold among many
second-generation youth in the Diaspora of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri
Lankan, or even Indo-Caribbean, descent” (p. 2). The desi scene is one in
which Indian American (and South Asian American) youth go to clubs to dance to
a style of remix music called “bangra,” which blends traditional
Indian music with more modern elements from hip-hop. Maira shows how, in this
subculture, the youth actively create the popular culture that they
simultaneously consume and develop understandings of their gendered racial
identities.
Many of the youth with whom Maira spoke mentioned the
different norms operating for men and women in this subculture. Men consider it
important to flaunt their material power through brand-name clothing. Maira
states that this masculine behavior is linked to nationalism and signals a
certain sense of ethnic authenticity. By contrast, women believe that both male
and female desi youth value sexually provocative behavior on the dance floor,
but these women also criticize other women for sexually suggestive behavior
that goes against what is considered proper behavior for an Indian American
woman.
In chapter three, Maira uses the term cultural
nostalgia to describe the range of activities the youth engage in to
explore the Indian side of their hybrid identity and feel more ethnically
authentic. She writes, “For many of the youth I spoke to, the notion of
being ‘truly’ or ‘really’ Indian involved possession of
certain knowledge or participation in certain activities. . . . The ideology of
nostalgia . . . is the ethnicized flip side to a notion of subcultural
‘cool’ based on American youth culture” (pp. 87–88). Many
of the youth who Maira interviewed grew up in predominantly White suburbs,
attended predominantly White high schools, and socialized with predominantly
White families. Maira describes key events in what these youth spoke of as
“coming out” as ethnically Indian, such as independent trips
“going back” to India or participating in Indian American and South
Asian American college group activities that often feature traditional Indian
films, music, and dance.
Chapter four revisits the theme of gender roles and their
link to nostalgia for Indian American youth. Masculinity is idealized through
strength, economic power, and authority, while femininity is idealized through
purity and chastity. These images develop in many ways out of pressures that
the youth feel from their immigrant parents. For example, Vijay says,
“I’m the oldest son . . . and for all practical purposes I’m
competing against my father for everything I do” (p. 162). Reena tells
Maira, “It’s so frustrating because the American value is you have to
be successful . . . and then the Indian culture is like, it’s family,
it’s family, it’s always family first!” (p. 161). While these
youth talk about recognizing and even resisting these pressures, they
simultaneously promote them through their cultural practices. For example,
males can easily adopt a “gangsta” style in their dress without
compromising their ethnicity, whereas women are more often expected to wear
traditional Indian clothing. Maira calls for scholars of feminist cultural
studies to examine masculinity in this youth culture context, and to recognize
that ideals of femininity are influenced by the material notions of masculinity
with which they interact.
In her final chapter, Maira emphasizes that scholars must
use an interdisciplinary lens to study the experiences of second-generation
immigrant youth, claiming that structural forces in the academy, particularly
in the humanities, prevent the collaborative endeavors necessary for this type
of study. She also criticizes the unwavering link between discipline and
methodology, wherein cultural studies tend to produce theoretical analysis and
anthropology tends to produce more empirical analysis. She worries that
documents of the experience of Indian American youth and groups like them will
get lost if scholars do not use multiple methodologies to bring together
disciplines such as anthropology, cultural studies, and Asian American studies.
Desis in the House demonstrates how ethnography in particular can be
applied to the field of Asian American studies. By linking empiricism with
cultural studies, Maira brings an increased understanding of how the multiple
forces of ethnicity, class, gender, and popular culture interact to influence
the experiences of one particular group of second-generation immigrant
youth.
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Growing Up with Television:
Everyday Learning among Adolescents
by JoEllen
Fisherkeller.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. 165 pp.
$19.95.
The influence of television on today’s youth is often
a subject of intense debate and public interest. Once envisioned as a medium
for transmitting information to enrich our educational lives, television has
become our primary source not only of news and educational material but also of
entertainment. Television is ubiquitous, and its presence has become virtually
impossible to ignore. Young people in particular spend a tremendous amount of
time watching and talking about television. Understanding how television
influences youth and their educational and social development is an important
part of understanding the intersection between popular culture and
education.
In Growing Up with Television: Everyday Learning among
Adolescents, JoEllen Fisherkeller presents portraits of three adolescents,
focusing on the role television plays in their lives and education. As
Fisherkeller notes in her introduction, “Even though cultural and media
studies now conceive of audiences as active meaning-makers at some level, most
often adults refer to youth as passive receivers of media messages and
images” (p. 2). Her purpose for this book was to illuminate how youth
engage in active meaning-making as they interact with television.
The three youth portrayed in Growing Up with
Television are students at an alternative middle school in New York City in
the early 1990s. Fisherkeller spent more than two months as an ethnographer at
the school, surveying fifty students about their general media habits,
including frequency of and motivation for watching television. She chose six
students as focal participants, with whom she conducted in-depth interviews and
household and school observations over the course of a year. Her book contains
individual portraits of three of the original six, who represent the greatest
range of diversity in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status,
family background, and personality.
The first portrait is of Marina, a sixth-grade girl who is
a first-generation immigrant from the Dominican Republic. Marina enjoyed
television that portrayed events that were either part of her real or desired
experience. In particular, she liked television shows that depicted what she
called “real” families, such as Roseanne, as well as those
that depicted characters who represented what she wanted to achieve in her
future life, such as Who’s the Boss?, which portrays a successful
female advertising executive. Marina also spoke about how television taught her
about social problems, often depicting multiple sides to an issue and prompting
her to sort out those multiple perspectives. She said that TV movies help her
learn about “drunk driving [and] things like that. . . . And about AIDS
and things like that. And drugs” (p. 42). Marina also appropriated
television images to define and describe her own identity. For example, because
of her physical maturity, school officials and peers often described Marina as
sexually advanced or experienced, which was not true. To deal with this
identity dilemma, Marina appropriated the image of explicitly sexual women like
Madonna, whom she described as a strong woman who is successful despite what
others think or say about her.
The second portrait is of Christopher, an African American
boy in the seventh grade who, at the time of the study, had recently moved to
New York City to live with his father and stepmother, after being neglected by
his mother. Fisherkeller describes a change in Christopher over the two years
of the study, from a shy, confused, and lonely boy to a confident and sociable
one. These changes were reflected in his television viewing habits. At the
beginning of the study, Christopher watched television to pass time and keep
company. By the end, however, television was a last-resort source of
entertainment for Christopher, after basketball and spending time with friends.
In addition, his tastes evolved from a preference for science fiction and
fantasy genres to reality-based, prime-time situation comedies. Fisherkeller
interprets Christopher’s changing preferences as a “settling
down.” Whereas he once felt most comfortable with himself in an imaginary
world of cartoon superheroes, he became more comfortable wrestling with his
identities in a more realistic world, such as by identifying with Theo Huxtable
(of The Cosby Show), an African American male who demonstrates strong
family values.
The final portrait in the book is of Samantha, an
Irish–Jewish American girl from a middle-class Bronx neighborhood who is
in the seventh grade. Because Samantha had a learning disability that made it
difficult for her to read and excel in school, she often turned to television
for entertainment. Samantha’s parents were educated, politically active
professionals. In Samantha’s home, television viewing was a family
activity: they all engaged in lively ongoing criticism of the shows they were
watching. She particularly liked talk shows, since they allowed her to engage
in a conversation about important social issues, and disliked programs that
“insulted” viewers with crude humor. Samantha also watched television
to define her identity. She was often described by her teachers as an
aggressive, outspoken student, and she came to terms with this identity in part
through her admiration of the title character in Murphy Brown, an
opinionated, independent, and successful female television newscaster.
Fisherkeller brings these portraits together in the final
two chapters by identifying common, cross-cutting themes. One theme is the use
of television to help youth find strategies for realizing visions of their
future “possible selves.” For the three youth, these visions come
from home and family cultures; however, television provided a way for these
youth to make these possible selves seem more realizable. Each of these youth
had television characters with whom he or she identified as having
characteristics that he or she hoped and expected to develop. Each of these
youth also was acutely aware of television as a commercial industry that can
manipulate images to serve certain ends. Fisherkeller argues that “they
have learned, at least tacitly, that engaging in the making of multiple media
forms is a credible and powerful means of economic survival and of
participating in public life” (p. 130).
Fisherkeller ends with an epilogue about Marina,
Christopher, and Samantha, including excerpts of interviews conducted at the
end of high school and again a few years after graduation. She intentionally
provides verbatim quotes with little analysis, letting the youth speak for
themselves and allowing the reader to develop his or her own insights. The role
of television in these individuals’ lives shifted dramatically. As the
students grew older, television was less influential in terms of helping them
understand their identities and more influential in helping them become
critical consumers of media. However, television continued to play an important
part in mobilizing them to assert their identities in multiple contexts.
Growing Up with Television is a useful addition to the field of popular
cultural studies. It is an in-depth exploration of how youth use television and
the images we receive through television to deal with personal and social
conflicts and tensions in their daily lives. Because these stories come from
the youth themselves, this book is not only authentic but also an enjoyable
read.
A.G. Back to Table of Contents
Latino/a Popular
Culture
edited by Michelle Habell-Pallán and Mary Romero.
New York: New York University Press, 2002. 280 pp. $55.00.
According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Latinos are now the
largest ethnic group in the United States. Thus, it is imperative that all
members of U.S. society better understand this heterogeneous group. As Michelle
Habell-Pallán and Mary Romero, authors of Latino/a Popular Culture,
state:
For Latinos at this millennial moment, as well as for
members of the dominant Anglo and African American cultures, popular culture
takes center stage in struggles over defining meaning. Within the magic,
ritualistic, and symbolic realm of popular culture, narratives are constructed
about the role Latinos will or will not play as part of the national body. (p.
4)
This is why volumes like this one edited by
Habell-Pallán, assistant professor in American Ethnic Studies at the
University of Washington, and Mary Romero, professor of Justice Studies at
Arizona University, are needed. They have woven together articles that examine
how American popular culture has been defining “Latino” and
“Latina.” They argue against a monolithic conception of Latinos/as,
since the heterogeneity within the Latino/a community is extensive in terms of
race, class, language, nationality, place of origin, citizenship, and
geography, and present “a juxtaposition and cross-examination of the
mosaic of contradictory and congratulatory images thrown up by the mass
media” (p. 2).
In the introduction, the editors remind us that we must
not look at the Latino/a culture in isolation or only within the U.S. context.
With recent migration patterns, we must understand the connections and bonds
forming between people not only in one country but also across countries in the
Americas. While the editors might have explored transnationalism even more,
this volume serves as a good “launching point” (p. 15).
The critical stance of the book’s introduction
establishes the foundation for the essays and contextualizes Latino/a popular
culture by discussing the following themes: “Constructing Latinas and
Latinos: ¿Qué Somos y Cómo Somos?” (“What
are we and how are we?”); “Mapping Latina/o Popular Culture and
Cultural Studies”; and “Issues of Representation, Audience, and
Production.”
The volume’s essays are divided in sections along
specific genres in cultural studies: media/culture, music, theater and art, and
sports. The relatively short pieces make for quick and accessible reads, yet
also offer new material for those already familiar with Latino/a culture and
cultural studies.
The section on media and culture includes essays by Arlene
Dávila (“Talking Back: Spanish Media and U.S. Latinidad”),
Frances Negrón-Montaner (“Barbie’s Hair: Selling Out Puerto
Rican Identity in the Global Market”); Tanya Katerí
Hernández (“The Buena Vista Social Club: The Racial Politics
of Nostalgia”); and Luz Calvo (“‘Lemme Stay, I Want to
Watch’: Ambivalence in Borderlands Cinema”). Each reader will be
drawn to different essays based on their particular areas of interest. Having
grown up in Mexico watching soap operas, I found Dávila’s essay
particularly fascinating, since she examines how focus groups of Latino/as in
New York perceive TV and radio channels geared toward Latinos/as, finding that
in some ways these channels reproduce existing hierarchies among this group,
such as a preference for light-skin tones. Dávila reminds us that we
must acknowledge the existence of racial and ethnic hierarchies among
Latinos/as in the United States (and specifically New York) due to their
particular histories, reasons for immigration, relationship between the United
States and their countries of origin, and position within the city (pp.
32–33). Readers who played with Barbies may find the article on Puerto
Rican Barbies interesting, especially as to the meaning that a Barbie
designated “Puerto Rican” created in the political and identity
arenas. Those who were hypnotized by the music in the Buena Vista Social
Club documentary (or fiction, in many ways, as revealed by the article)
will appreciate the article by Katerí Hernández, who examines the
role of the American music producer who “discovers,”
“saves,” or colonizes the aging musicians on the island of Cuba. The
article further discusses the U.S.-Cuba relationship and the power of the U.S.
music industry.
The section on music contains essays by Ana Patricia
Rodríguez (“Encrucijadas: Rubén Blades at the
Transnational Crossroads”); Josh Kun (“’The Sun Never Sets on
MTV: Tijuana NO! and the Border Music Video”); Deborah R. Vargas
(“Bidi Bidi Bom Bom: Selena and Tejana Music in the Making of
Tejas”); and Raquel Rivera (“Hip Hop and New York Puerto
Ricans”). Rodríguez’s article informs us that renowned Latino
musician Rubén Blades’ Central American identity has been ignored,
yet emerges in some of his music, where he speaks of the Central American
transnational experiences and migrations. According to Rodríguez, the
song “La Rosa de los Vientos” exemplifies songs that advocate the
development of extended Central American Latino identities and alliances. Josh
Kun, on the other hand, writes about Tijuana NO!, the U.S.-Mexico border band,
the resistance music they perform, and what it means to have it promoted (or
not) by MTV and its globalizing music empire.
The theater and art section includes articles by Alberto
Sandoval Sánchez (“Paul Simon’s The Capeman: The
Staging of Puerto Rican National Identity as Spectacle and Commodity on
Broadway”); Melissa A. Fitch (“Gender Bending in Latino Theater:
Johnny Diego, The Hispanic Zone, and Deporting the Divas by
Guillermo Reyes”); Michelle Habell-Pallán (“‘Don’t
Call Us Hispanic’: Popular Latino Theater in Vancouver”); William A.
Nericcio (“A Decidedly ‘Mexican’ and ‘American’
Semi[er]otic Transference: Frida Kahlo in the Eyes of Gilbert Hernandez”);
and Juan Velasco (“Performing Multiple Identities: Guillermo
Gómez-Peña and His ‘Dangerous Border Crossings’”).
Habell-Pallán’s article offers a clear discussion on the idea of
transnationality and multiple identities for the members of a theater group in
Vancouver that followed Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed process. The
author explains, “The play seeks to disrupt outdated cultural conceptions
about who constitutes Canada and to define a citizenship of the Americas”
(p. 178). Habell-Pallán also suggests that the use of Chicano elements
in the play reveals the transculturation of Chicano cultural production outside
of the United States, compelling Chicano studies to move beyond the U.S.-Mexico
framework toward strategies to connect people of color in the Americas.
For those interested in the genre of sports, Latino/a
Popular Culture offers a section with articles by Adrian Burgos Jr.
(“Learning America’s Other Game: Baseball, Race, and Study of
Latinos”); Christopher A. Shinn (“Fútbol Nation: U.S. Latinos
and the Goal of a Homeland”); and Gregory Rodríguez (“Boxing
and Masculinity: The History and (Her)story of Oscar de la Hoya”).
Burgos’ essay is especially fascinating in terms of the story of baseball
player “Sandy” Nava, who was apparently Mexican American and played
during the second half of the nineteenth century. According to Burgos, the
presence of Latinos forced baseball’s racial system of Black and White to
expand by forming new racial/ethnic categories that conferred a circumscribed
Whiteness or revising older categories such as the notion of
“‘Spanish’ identity” (p. 235). The latter emphasized that
some Latinos came from Spanish descent and implied that they had “pure
blood” (p. 235), since they had not mixed with Blacks.
Latino/a Popular Culture greatly contributes to the
genres of both cultural studies and Latino studies. The editors exhort
undergraduate and graduate students to continue looking at Latino/a popular
culture as “a site of invention, critique and pleasure” (p. 16),
since much work still needs to be done in this area.
A.K. Back to Table of Contents
Brave New Voices: The Youth
Speaks Guide to Teaching Spoken Word Poetry
by Jen Weiss and
Scott Herndon.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2001. 120 pp.
$15.75.
Many young people in the United States are immersed in the
world of popular culture, particularly hip-hop music. For this reason, Jen
Weiss and Scott Herndon’s book, Brave New Voices: The Youth Speaks
Guide to Teaching Spoken Word Poetry, will be helpful for teachers working
with young people in all kinds of settings. Weiss and Herndon invite teachers
to draw on young people’s experience with hip-hop to push their students
to become conscious and critical producers of the spoken word. As Weiss and
Herndon assert, young people will then feel more confident about themselves and
share with others what they have to say about the society in which we
live.
Brave New Voices is based on the workshops that
Weiss, Herndon, and others have conducted in New York and San Francisco for
Youth Speaks, a nonprofit, grassroots organization. The book is a guide for
teachers, community organizations, and educators in afterschool programs who
would like to teach about spoken word poetry, or “poetry that is written
on a page but performed for an audience” (p. 118). Weiss and Herndon tell
readers, “We want to put poetry into the hands of as many teenagers as we
can. Our strongest connection is through you, our community of dedicated and
passionate teachers” (p. xvii). Brave New Voices is meant for
“teachers who want to be involved in the creative lives of their
students” (p. xxi).
The book is designed as a blueprint for a five-week
workshop on spoken word poetry. It is divided into six chapters. Each of the
first five details one week of the workshop, and the sixth explains how to
culminate the workshop with a live performance of student work. The first
chapter, “Week 1: Getting Started,” gives teachers some parameters
for beginning the workshop. The authors emphasize that the workshop should be
student driven. Weiss and Herndon warn against teachers exerting tight control
over the structure of the lesson or the activities of the students. They invite
teachers to allow themselves to feel afraid of the students, and to believe
that any resistance they may encounter from the students is “vulnerable
resistance,” or resistance that the students may have to feeling
vulnerable, which will subside as the students are drawn out of their shells
and into the workshop. The authors effectively convince readers that teachers
must create a space that allows for the inclusion of all students’ voices
so as to “empower everyone and anyone who wants to start writing about
their world and begin speaking their minds with sharpened wits and chiseled
words” (p. 19).
The second chapter, “Week 2: Generating
Momentum,” addresses how students can form a community in which they
themselves become one another’s audience and provide support and feedback
to each other. Weiss and Herndon suggest that students think of their poems as
meaningless until they bring them to student-centered workshops, read and
discuss them, and have other students provide them with their insights.
“Week 3: Using Rhythm and Hip-Hop” invites
teachers to expand and coach students to polish the work the students are
starting to write. The authors define hip-hop and assure readers that they
don’t have to be experts in the genre in order to conduct the workshop. As
they explain, “We think it’s a boon because when you encounter
unfamiliar terrain, you must listen” (p. 60). The authors encourage
teachers to look beyond spoken word poetry as merely a written work, but also
“as a complex of written, visual, and aural performances” (p. 62),
and to create a pedagogical space in which they can be surprised and have fun
with the young people in the workshop. Weiss and Herndon suggest, however, that
“the sooner you can learn what poetry means to your students, the
sooner you can begin to coach them to write productively in whatever mode they
choose” (p. 55).
In “Week 4: The Politics of Poetry,” Weiss and
Herndon recount the history of the spoken word as an art form, especially its
link to politics and political voice for marginalized groups. According to the
authors, the spoken word movement purposefully broke away from the highbrow,
academic definition of poetry and operated outside of the conventional frame of
“serious” poetry. Instead, spoken word poetry was founded on an
acceptance “of all cultures, social types, and voices” (p. 78) and
focused on the politics and poetics of oppressed people. This chapter is
informative, but even though students do not learn it until the fourth week of
the workshop, readers of this text would have benefited from knowing this
background information sooner. A contextual and historical understanding of
spoken word from the beginning would give the readers a lens through which to
consider all the chapters in the book.
“Week 5: Revision and Performance,” describes
how students revise their work based on the critiques given by their peers.
Weiss and Herndon suggest guidelines for revisions, including a clear
understanding of what the poem is about, what it means to its creator, and how
to make that meaning clear to the audience. They also provide some specific
exercises for revising.
The final chapter, “Letting the Poets Speak: The
Poetry Event,” gives teachers suggestions and checklists to help them
organize a spoken word poetry performance with the students’ help. This
chapter is technically helpful but the least inspiring, due to its
checklist-like presentation. This ending is especially anticlimactic
considering that, for the five preceding chapters, the authors included works
by and reflections of young people who have participated in Youth Speaks.
In addition to including young people’s voices
throughout Brave New Voices, the authors provide suggested exercises at
the end of each chapter. This will help teachers who do not have much
experience in teaching poetry, spoken word poetry in particular. Some of the
exercises are clear and exciting, while others may not be specific enough to
guide some teachers. The book also provides useful references to poems,
documentaries, and other resources.
The book is an inspiring introduction for teachers
unfamiliar with spoken word poetry, although novices may need more guidance.
For teachers familiar with spoken word poetry and with the culture of hip-hop,
this book may provide the jump-start they need to organize a workshop. For
others, like this reviewer, the book may spark thinking about poetry and youth
empowerment. It brought to light the fact that there is a large culture of
spoken word poetry for young people, and all of us should consider seriously
how we can integrate elements of it at the very least, especially as it
provides an alternative approach to learning from what is usually presented in
a traditionally structured school, which may serve to hook students and create
a space for their voices to be heard.
A.K. Back to Table of Contents
Peace
by Tucker
Shaw.
New York: Alloy Books, 2002. 142 pp. $9.99.
As I sorted through what seemed mostly unimpressive
literature in the Young Adults section of a bookstore chain, Tucker Shaw’s
Peace attracted me with the peace logo on its cover. This book may be of
interest to teachers in high schools, adults working with youth in other
alternative settings, parents, and, most importantly, the youth to whom the
book is explicitly directed.
The impetus for Peace was September 11, 2001. Shaw
states that, since that day,
things have changed. We now have new priorities, new
challenges, new questions, new knowledge, new fears, new concerns, new heroes.
We are, around the world, new people. Peace really means something now. And
it’s something we are all responsible for. Each one of us. Working toward
peace is within our control. (p. 3)
Shaw seeks to encourage young people to think about what
peace means to them, to highlight the heroic acts of people throughout the
world who have fought for peace peacefully, and to incite young readers to
fight proactively for peace.
Shaw divides the book into five sections. Part One, What Is
Peace? asks teenagers what peace is, what it is not, and in what kinds of
places young people seek peace. An array of responses from youth, mostly from
the United States, follows. This section offers readers a glimpse of how some
young people understand the concept of peace through their own words. For
instance, an 18-year-old man from New York defines peace as “more than
just the absence of war. It is equality and justice. It can be applied to the
world, or to one’s own personal peace of mind” (p. 10).
Unfortunately, it is unclear how the author elicited or sorted through the
responses from youth, since some of the same youth voices, especially those
from outside the United States, appear often in the book.
In Part Two, a historical section entitled Peace Then,
Shaw opens by describing the twentieth century as the most violent in history.
He offers highlights of inspirational leaders who have fought for peace and
justice, offering brief biographies of historical figures or “Peace
Greats,” such as Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Steven Biko, and
Nelson Mandela, which are meant to inspire and inform readers about leaders who
have fought for peace through nonviolent resistance. This chapter also lists
the last twenty-five winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and briefly describes the
reasons for the awards. The section ends with a brief recounting of moments
that Shaw believes contributed to peace in the twentieth century. However, he
tends to summarize complicated historical events in just a few lines, thus
reducing their impact, and he also offers a number of questionable
generalizations. For instance, Shaw states that populations soared in poor
nations, and that people “were dissatisfied with their lives, making them
more likely to support violent changes” (p. 21). The book would stimulate
deeper understanding of world situations if the author delved into more
historical details.
Part Three, Peace Now, focuses mostly on the September 11
events. According to Shaw, “On that day everything changed. Suddenly we
woke up” and had to live in a new world (p. 50). Like Part One, this
section elicits the voices of young people describing where they were on that
day, what they were thinking, what they did to help out after 9/11, and how
their lives have changed since. Included are two U.S. Muslim youth’s
responses (originally from Tanzania and Pakistan) to the mistreatment and
harassment they suffered due to their classmates’ ignorance. Theirs are
stories of dignity and resilience. For example, a schoolmate told a young
Pakistani man that he must be the son of Bin Laden. In response, he wrote an
article in which he stated that “the man behind the terrorist attack is
just as ignorant as the man who torched the car shop [of a Pakistani in
Houston], who is just as ignorant as the student that saw me as the son of a
terrorist” (p. 89). Another story is of a high school student who was
suspended from school for wearing a T-shirt that sarcastically criticized the
U.S. bombing in Afghanistan. This young woman was willing to stand her ground
in opposing the war overseas because she felt that “what we’re doing
to them is just as bad as what they did to us, and I think it needs to be
stopped” (p. 92). These stories show youth at their most courageous.
In Part Four, Peace Tomorrow, Shaw again reminds his
readers that “we can’t wait for anyone else to bring us peace. . . .
If we want peace, we have to work for it together . . . and we’ll have to
keep working for it forever” (p. 110). Again, Shaw includes youth
responses to questions about how they are making a difference now and how they
will contribute in the future. Shaw also presents more “Peace
Greats,” including Rigoberta Menchú and the Dalai Lama. The
strength of this section lies in its quick portraits of young people pursing
peace in organized ways — from websites to organizations such as Seeds for
Peace. Shaw also discusses the Peace Corps. His explicit message is that Peace
Corps volunteers have changed the lives of people in other countries; however,
he does not mention how the lives of the volunteers have changed. This stance
reflects a tacit ideology that may dangerously imply that Americans are the
imparters of knowledge to the “less developed” people.
The book ends with suggestions of actions youth can take.
Shaw profiles an 18-year-old who has been proactive in trying to bring about
change by creating a website where teens can discuss topics such as racism,
violence, and discrimination, and where other young people can learn about
important resources. Shaw also provides a list of website resources that young
people may consult in order to see how they may be more active players in
bringing about change.
The overall message of Peace is positive and the
book is worth reading. The targeted readers — young people — have an
opportunity to read their peers’ opinions. However, one significant
shortcoming of the book is that its content seems too brief and simplified,
almost as if to make the book a quick and entertaining read. Although this book
only provides one layer in a discussion, Peace may provide the hook for
some youth to begin to explore this crucial topic.
A.K. Back to Table of Contents
Harvard Education Publishing Group
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