Andrew W' Habana Hafner

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Creating Third Spaces in Middle School Language
Arts Curriculum with Hip Hop Texts
Andrew W. Habana Hafner University of
Massachusetts Amherst The ACCELA
Alliance English Language Development
Conference Boston College - Teachers for a New
Era September 24, 2007
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Core Constructs

• Third spaces are in-between spaces of lived
  experience that are productive social mediations
  of multiple and competing discourses working to
  reshape knowledges and social identities
• Hybridity - sites of productive tension cultural
  dissonance reappropriation of colonizing
  discourses (e.g. official school texts)
• Funds of knowledge - non-school literacies from
  culture, peer, family, popular culture, etc.
• Permeability - openness to the childrens lived
  experience and language negotiated classroom
  culture dialogic meaning-making

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Hip Hop Genres Third Spaces

• Hip Hop can be used as a bridge linking
  seemingly vast spans between the streets and the
  world of academics. Hip Hop texts, given their
  thematic nature, can be equally valuable as
  springboards for critical discussions about
  contemporary issues facing urban youth.
• (Morrell Duncan-Andrade, 2002)

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Research Question

• How does the integration of Hip Hop genres in
  formal curriculum create third spaces to promote
  academic and critical literacy for culturally and
  linguistically diverse students in urban
  classrooms?

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Preliminary Findings

• Third spaces stem from the focal teachers
  willingness to take personal pedagogical risks
  to engage students in the writing life about
  their lived experiences.
• Integration of Hip Hop genres promoted student
  investment in building academic literacy while
  thinking and writing critically about real-world
  experiences.

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Context of Curriculum Unit

• Alternative program for highly mobile students
  and their families
• Teacher is a 18 year veteran teacher white
  woman life-long local resident
• Focal Group 3 bilingual Latino males, 1 white
  male varied experiences of homelessness,
  social/child services, foster care, probation
  officers, interrupted schooling, substance abuse
• The Writing Life unit introduces craft of
  writing for authentic and personal purposes based
  on everyday lived experiences

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Shaping Third Spaces Risk Taking w/ Hip Hop
Genres

• Slide from teachers graduate course
  presentation reflecting on taking risks with Hip
  Hop genres

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Transformative Texts Teaching Learning The
Writing Life

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Writing Life from Thug Life Tupac as
literate model
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Writing LifeMiguels first piece
Tired of Not being understood. Understand
me, Dont ignore me, I feel small, Im like
burning paper, Put out my fire Tired of being
ignored TIRED
At the end of the unit, discussing
metacognitively why listening to music helps
their writing process Like Tupac, talking
about real life, I love that.
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Sheltering Instructions mediating textual
spaces of homelessness

• I go downstairs
• to adults acting like kids
• and kids acting like adults
• passing gossip around
• like they were ten
• hitting kids with
• no pain or care
• -Mark, 10.27.04

Video clip
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Hybrid Cultures Community in Third Space

• Thirdspace becomes a productive hybrid cultural
  space, rather than a fragmented angst-ridden
  psychological space, only if teachers and
  students incorporate divergent texts in the hope
  of generating new knowledges and Discourses
  (Moje, et al, 2004).
• Hybrid agencies find their voice in a dialectic
  that does not seek cultural supremacy or
  sovereignty and construct visions of community
  that give narrative form to the minority
  positions they occupy. (Bhabha, 1994)

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Implications for Teaching Finding third spaces
in unfamiliar places

• The transformative potential of dialogical
  risk-taking in shaping and mediating third spaces
  in schools.
• Teachers as well as children must be open,
  curious, and willing to imagine worlds beyond
  their own Building on what children do is
  not so easy, because doing so involves granting
  legitimacy and visibility to social purposes and
  cultural materials that educators may view as
  trivial, irrelevant, and even distasteful.
• (Dyson, 1993)

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Implications for LearningThird Spaces Hip Hop
Genres

• Literacy becomes a vehicle by which the
  oppressed are equipped with the necessary tools
  to reappropriate their history, culture, and
  language practices.
• Hip Hop music and culture can be utilized to
  forge a common and critical discourse that is
  centered upon the lives of the students, yet
  transcends the racial divide and allows us to
  tap into students lives in ways that promote
  academic literacy and critical consciousness.
• (Morrell Duncan-Andrade 2002).