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Cultural Capital
E n g l i sh in Australia Volume 45 Number 2 • 2010
Cultural Capital and Popular Culture in Year 11 Standard English: Fostering Student Choice and Synthesis Eve Mayes, Condell Park High School Abstract: Hip Hop Based Pedagogy is a significant movement in the United States that uses hip hop texts not as ‘gimmicks to entice students to be compliant and cooperate’ but for their expression of ‘enduring and comprehensive themes’ (Ladson-Billings, 2009, p. ix). Texts that draw on students’ popular cultures can be used in a manner that makes ‘explicit connections between students’ everyday knowledge and the demands of subject-matter learning’ (Lee, Spencer & Harpalani, 2003, p. 7). Texts that draw on students’ cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) were integrated into a Year 11 Standard English Area of Study in a comprehensive public high school in a low socio-economic area in NSW in an attempt to improve students’ skills in independently selecting and analysing texts of their own choosing and in synthesising prescribed and related texts. The strategies used with Eminem’s song Stan in particular were found to improve students’ engagement, independent inquiry and the quality of their written responses.
In educational circumstances that honor all students, cultural capital grows out of acts of mutual barter (Pradl, 2002, p. 526) In the Year 12 (HSC) Standard Course in New South Wales, students are required to study four types of prescribed texts, one drawn from each of the categories of prose fiction, drama, poetry, non-fiction or film or media or multimedia texts (Board of Studies, 1999, p. 28). These prescribed texts are chosen by schools from a Prescriptions list, produced by the Board of Studies and updated periodically. Additionally, students are required to read and respond to ‘a wide range of additional related texts and textual forms’ (Board of Studies, 1999, p. 28) that are relevant to the Area of Study and are drawn ‘from a variety of sources, in a range of genres and media’ (Board of Studies, 1999, p. 29). Students are prepared for these textual requirements by studying and writing about ‘prescribed’ (set by the school) and related texts in Year 11. Our English faculty, in a low socio-economic comprehensive high school in South-West Sydney, was faced with three realities at the end of 2009 with our Year 11 and 12 Standard English students: they were disengaged, they struggled to write in detail on a text of their own choosing and they almost invariably neglected to synthesise prescribed and related texts in their extended response writing. On the other side of the world in January 2010, on a study tour as part of the NSW Premier’s English Scholarship1, I entered a downtown New York classroom. Students’ desks were assembled into an inward-facing circle, with students reading Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This text was chosen for its literary merit (it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008) as well as its cultural responsiveness.
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As the teacher read from the novel, students read along, stopping to scribble on post-it notes. The teacher stumbled over a Spanish word and asked students to correct her pronunciation and translate. She then stopped and asked what students had written on their post-it notes. They had written literal (in the text), interpretive (between the lines of the text) or applied (beyond the text) questions for discussion. These questions often centred on the construction of gender, race and class in the text. Students’ questions shaped the classroom discussion, reversing the usual ‘English classroom’ trend for comprehension questions prepared by the teacher and passively answered by disengaged students. The remarkable part of this practice at this school is that it is not confined to the one teacher interested in inquiry-based learning; every teacher uses the same approach with all students, from 9th to 12th Grade. In particular, students are well equipped to critique race, class and gender discourses in texts. By graduation, students are thoroughly independent learners with opinions, able to articulate and defend their positions on how they have been positioned by texts. This experience lingered with me when discussing approaches to poetry and the state of English (Language Arts) education in the United States with Gordon Pradl, Honorary Professor of English Education at New York University. We discussed how, as an early career teacher, he had discovered the power of revealing to students his ‘primary acts of reading’. These are the ‘reading events in which readers are working their way though a text for the first time, with all the gold or dross, insights or false starts, that might entail’ (Pradl, 1987, p. 67). These events contrast with ‘secondary acts of reading – publicly reporting on the results of a previous encounter with a text’, where lessons involve pre-packaged questions and deconstructions of literary techniques, presented by the ‘expert’ to the uninitiated (p. 67). Pradl vulnerably chose to expose his mistakes in interpretation to students as they collectively worked through a poem on the back of a Rolling Stones album, a text brought in by a student. Pradl desired to voice his ‘interior monologue’, allowing students to ‘eavesdrop’ on his primary acts of reading, in order to ‘demystify the anxiety’ surrounding interpretation of poetry and thus allow each student to own the text ‘in a primary way, because there are no previous meanings to inhibit us’ (1987, pp. 68–69). In our conversation, Pradl lamented the consequences of test-driven pedagogy that neglects to teach
students how to engage in primary acts of reading: ‘The minute where they are not asked about their own opinion begins remedial learning.’ At the same time, he acknowledged the difficulties that come when texts from students’ popular cultures are introduced into the curriculum: ‘when [the students’] culture is validated, the dominant culture feels threatened’ (pers. comm., 20/01/10). Inspired by the experience in a classroom and in dialogue in New York, and intrigued by the possibility of shifting classroom dynamics, I sought to re-orient my Year 11 Standard students’ approach to texts and to writing during the Area of Study a 10 week focus studied in Term 1. The Area of Study is 60% of the course content in Year 11 English and is common across the Standard and Advanced courses. The syllabus describes an Area of Study as ‘the exploration of a concept that affects our perceptions of ourselves and our world … ‘[s]tudents explore, analyse, question and articulate the ways in which perceptions of this concept are shaped in and through a variety of texts’ (Board of Studies, 1999, p. 4). Our faculty sensed that disengagement in the Area of Study in Year 11 stemmed from three factors: the students’ lack of interest in the texts studied, deficit messages about student ability and lack of opportunities for student choice. Our students, from a variety of cultural backgrounds, have similar responses to those of urban students in the US described by David E. Kirkland; they ‘fail to engage (read and write about) traditional classroom texts, either because such texts lack relevance to them (Ladson-Billings, 1996), or because such texts promote perspectives and interests that are threatening to them’ (Kirkland, 2007, p. 131). My understanding of the importance of engaging student messages came from reading research into engagement of students from low socio-economic backgrounds (Fair Go Team, 2006; Munns & Woodward, 2007; Munns, 2007). Researchers involved in this study had argued that schools, through their curriculum, pedagogy and assessment practices ‘convey powerful messages’ that ‘shape individual perceptions of what they might do, and what they might become’ (McFadden and Munns, 2002, pp. 362–363). Traditionally, students at schools with a high proportion of students from a low socioeconomic background have received deficit messages about their knowledge, ability, control, place and voice. It was hoped that a new approach to the Area of Study could lead to an articulation of different messages about knowledge (‘We can see the connection and the
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meaning’), ability (‘I am capable’), control (‘We can do this together’), place (‘It’s great to be a [student] from …’) and voice (‘We share’) (Fair Go Team, 2006, p. 13). Genuine choice throughout the Area of Study was hoped to be one way of placing choice and student voice at the centre of the classroom. Thus, in re-conceiving the Year 11 Standard Area of Study (Journey), my aims were to: • demystify the hidden processes of reading for understanding by explicitly unveiling how expert readers engage in primary acts of reading. • move students from being passive recipients of teacher-delivered information about texts to active constructors of knowledge, asking their own questions of texts and finding answers for themselves. • give students choice in text selection and instruction with the opportunity to enjoy the process of making choices. • scaffold students’ oral responses to texts towards a sophisticated analytical written response. • explicitly teach students how to meaningfully synthesise prescribed and related texts in their analytical responses. Students undertaking the Standard English course had previously been weak at this skill of finding their own texts and conducting their own investigation of it, relying instead on teacher support. This passivity had also resulted in a reluctance to take up the opportunity for choice in assignments or texts. This had been particularly evident in our first assessment task in previous years, which required students to independently locate, analyse and write a speech about a related text, synthesising it with their prescribed text. In this assessment task in the past, a significant number of students did not submit the task on the due date, subsequently receiving zero. I decided to use hip hop texts as a springboard into the tired Area of Study ‘Journey.’ Whilst there could be some questions of the cultural relevance of using texts originating within American, Caribbean and African diasporic traditions in a classroom of students from Lebanese, Vietnamese or Pacific Islander backgrounds, I agreed with Mark Lamont Hill that ‘hip hop has been consumed and refashioned in ways that respond to the experiences, traditions, imaginations, and desires of young people throughout the world’ (2009, p. 1). Hip hop has become a ‘language’ that students navigate, appropriate and refashion in their local contexts. I hoped to use hip hop texts in a similar way to
Marc Lamont Hill (2009) with his students in North Philadelphia: not as ‘gimmicks to entice students to be compliant and cooperate’ but for their expression of ‘enduring and comprehensive themes’ (LadsonBillings, 2009, p. ix). Instead of desiring to ‘ “rescue” students from their communities and cultures’, I wanted to ‘see students’ cultures as the “stuff” of learning’ (Ladson-Billings, 2009, p. ix). This was not without ambiguity though – using American texts with predominantly Lebanese, Vietnamese and Pacific Islander teenagers is different to the use of texts written in North Philadelphia with students from the same suburbs. The definition of culture was broadened beyond defining it as immediate cultural background to apprehending the significance of popular culture in my students’ construction of their subjectivities. Indeed, this resonates with Bourdieu’s notion of ‘cultural capital’ (1986) and the acknowledgement that ‘[d]ifferences in capital between different positions are differences of power’ (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999, p. 101). I was interested in making ‘explicit connections between students’ everyday knowledge and the demands of subject-matter learning’ (Lee, Spencer & Harpalani, 2003, p. 7) in a way that elicited students’ input from their out-of-school literacies of ‘globalised’ popular culture. In doing so, I hoped to ‘positively contribute to student confidence, curricular engagement and teacher-student relationships’ (Hill, 2009, p. 8). Thus, the Year 11 course was consciously shaped to bridge the gap between students’ cultural capital and the demands of the HSC syllabus. Students voted on which poet to study for the Area of Study early in the year after reading and commenting on 10 poets’ work at reading stations, eventually deciding to study the poetry of Maureen Watson, a female Aboriginal poet and activist. During the Area of Study and other units of work, a number of texts responding to students’ interests and knowledge were studied, including Nick Enright’s play A Property of the Clan and Tony Kaye’s film American History X. To narrow the scope of the discussion, I have chosen to focus on one of the texts – Eminem’s song – Stan. This was a significant text because it was studied early in the school year (during Weeks 3–4 of Term 1) and set the standard for the quality of students’ work for the rest of the school year. Our study of Stan provides one example of how a hip hop text used during the Area of Study shaped students’ development as readers and writers and will be the focus of the remainder of this article.
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Eminem’s Stan Stan was considered to be a hip hop text that could effectively introduce students to the concept of Journey. The lyrics were the focus of the textual study, but were initially read through watching and listening to the film clip (see reference list for access details). In Stan Eminem tells the agonised emotional journey of a young man, Stan, who is obsessed with Eminem’s adopted persona, Slim Shady. A journey of emotional fragmentation is traced through the song as Stan writes letters to Slim, his emotions progressing from anticipation, to frustration, to overt aggression as Slim fails to reply to his letters. This emotional journey stems from his imaginative journey, as he perceives Slim to be a mirrored image of himself and imagines a developing relationship between them. This emotional turmoil leads to a physical journey as Stan kills his pregnant girlfriend and then himself. Simultaneously, the song also explores the emotional journey of Stan’s girlfriend and Slim himself as he awakes to the reality of the situation at the end of the song when he writes a letter in reply. Indeed, the song explores how the obstacles faced during emotional, imaginative and physical journeys can extend people psychologically, can impact on others, and can broaden people’s view of themselves and the world. Students first read and viewed the film clip for Stan. The second time that the song was read/viewed, they wrote at least two questions that they wanted to discuss about the song. These questions could be literal (the answer found in the text), interpretive (the answer found between the lines of the text and open for discussion) or applied (beyond the text, extending to broader issues in society). Examples of these different types of questions were provided to scaffold students into constructing their own questions. After students had written their own questions, they formed a group of four. In their group of four, students in turn read their questions to the group. Each person was allocated a number. Student One read out their question. Student Two made a comment about the question (an answer, why they thought the question was insightful) without interruption. Then Student Three also made a comment, then Student Four. Finally, Student One made a closing comment (their answer to the question, their reflection on the comments made by other students). The other students’ questions were shared and discussed in the same manner, allowing quieter voices to contribute and more dominant voices to be tempered. As a group,
the four students narrowed down their questions to one key question that the class discussed. The student-devised class discussion questions for Stan were: • What is Stan’s tone at the beginning of the song? How does it change? • What is the significance of the chorus: ‘My tea’s gone cold I’m wondering why I.../ Got out of bed at all/ The morning rain clouds up my window/ and I can’t see at all/ And even if I could it’d all be gray,/ but your picture on my wall/ It reminds me, that it’s not so bad,/ it’s not so bad…’? • Is Stan in love with Slim Shady? • Is Stan mentally unstable? • Why does Slim Shady say, ‘Damn!’ at the end of the song? The classroom discussions that were generated out of these student-devised questions were insightful and heated, involving students from the original group that had decided on the question as well as other class members. There was a distinct move away from the traditional ‘Initiation – Response – Feedback’ pattern of classroom interaction (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975) to a fluid discussion between students. The teacher’s role was to wonder aloud with the students about the potential significance of particular symbols and develop the implications of particular interpretations raised by students. In particular, discussion of the chorus led to observations about intertextuality and the potential symbolism of the female voice’s words. Students argued that the female’s voice in the chorus could represent Stan’s feelings, comforted by Slim’s picture on his wall, or Stan’s girlfriend’s feelings, hopeful that Stan’s temporary obsession would pass with time. Students engaged in discussion about the symbolism of the tea going ‘cold’, arguing over whether it symbolised waiting for Slim’s letter/ Stan’s change or whether it represented a cooling of Stan’s feelings from anticipation to resentment. Further, one student questioned whether the ‘morning rain cloud[ing] up the window’ in the chorus was ‘warning us’ about Stan’s death in a car in a river at the end of the song, leading to a discussion of the technique of foreshadowing. After discussing the lyrics and initial exploration of the concept of journey in the song, students broke into pairs to identify techniques in Stan, using a list of techniques on the board as prompts. They drew arrows on the text, labelling them with the name of the tech-
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nique. In another colour, they wrote a nominalised description of the effect of the technique (e.g. ‘creates a feeling of his obsession with Slim’ rather than ‘shows he is obsessed with Slim’). One student thoughtfully observed as he re-read the poem, ‘There are at least three techniques in almost every line!’ Through this process of discovery, students desired to know the name of techniques to use to describe quotations including, ‘I left my cell, my pager, and my home phone at the bottom’; ‘I’m your biggest fan’; ‘Dear Mister-I’mToo-Good-To-Call-Or-Write-My-Fans’ and ‘You know this song by Phil Collins, “From the air in the night” ’. In this way, techniques including cumulation, the superlative, punctuation such as hyphens, and allusions were introduced at the point of student curiosity rather than through a suffocating and overloading decontextualised list of techniques. Techniques were pooled before students worked in pairs on one technique, filling in a table of techniques for a specific part of the song. What’s happening in the song (context)
Quotation and technique
Effect (This creates a feeling of…)
Link to the concept of journey (This shows…)
All pairs’ tables were pooled and photocopied for the whole class to use. In pooling students’ texts, the class peer-marked and made suggestions and additions to the work of their classmates. In particular, the class focused on nominalisation when describing the effect of a technique – writing ‘creates a feeling of [NOUN]’ rather than ‘shows he is [ADJECTIVE].’ Once this ‘formula’ was understood, students could experiment with varying their structure and using other phrases instead of ‘This creates a feeling of …’ and ‘This shows …’. Creates a feeling Creates a sense of… of… Suggests that… Generates a feeling of… Evokes (brings up) a feeling of… Portrays (shows) a feeling of… Engenders (brings about) a feeling of… Emphasises (makes stronger) her feeling of… Highlights her feeling of…
This shows that…
This This This This This This This
demonstrates… reveals… conveys… suggests… implies… proves… illustrates…
The aim in this was to make explicit the movement from spoken discussions about the text’s meaning and techniques towards a more sophisticated, analytical written form (Hammond & Gibbons, 2005). The class discussion and led to the following jointly constructed paragraph for the chorus of the song: Throughout the song, the chorus utilises intertextuality, sampling a chorus from Dido’s song ‘Thank you’ to convey the emotional journey of the characters. The female voice sweetly sings, ‘My tea’s gone cold I’m wondering why I.../ Got out of bed at all/ The morning rain clouds up my window.’ The alliteration of ‘wondering why’ and the ellipsis suggests a sense of the longing of a number of characters, simultaneously representing Stan’s anticipation of a letter and his girlfriend’s patient hope that Stan’s obsession with Slim will dissipate with time. At the same time, the ‘morning rain’ clouding up the window foreshadows the tragic event at the end of the song as Stan drives his car off a bridge. These images suggest that the emotional journey of one person impacts on others, leading to anticipation and pain at times.
Students’ assessment tasks: Speech about a related text The Year 11 students’ related text speech assessment task completion and results demonstrated that they had understood how to independently choose related material, conduct their own ‘primary acts of reading’ and actively construct their own understanding of an unfamiliar text. In 2010, there were only two students in the class who did not complete the task on time. These students were still able to independently complete the task late. Only one student wrote about Stan rather than independently investigating a text of their own choosing. While it is difficult to compare different cohorts of students, the difference in results between students in 2010 and previous years suggests that there was a difference in student learning. Students in 2010 achieved higher marks in this assessment task than previous cohorts of students, with three students achieving marks of 15 or above (out of 20). The students’ work displayed an increased confidence in the process of analysis, having previously been involved in primary acts of reading with unfamiliar
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texts and in learning how to move from these initial questions to investigation and analysis of texts. They were enthusiastic about exercising agency to discern which texts were suitable for a study of journey. Despite being told that they could use Stan as their related material for the assessment task, the majority of students used their recently developed skills in literary analysis to conduct their own independent investigations of texts of their own choosing. Scaffolded into apprehending the literary depth of song lyrics, a number of students chose songs by Tupac Shakur as related material. When I asked during a class discussion why Tupac was chosen by many students in the class (rather than more ‘literary’ texts), students replied that he is an ‘inspirational’ figure, that he is ‘lyrically smart,’ expresses ‘strong feelings’ and ‘connects to us’. They appreciated that he often told ‘true stories’ and had ‘deeper messages’ beneath the stories in his texts. One student said that Tupac has ‘more techniques’ in his songs than Eminem and other students agreed. However, it is difficult to determine whether some students’ choice of Tupac reflected a lack of confidence in choosing their own texts, choosing to remain within the genre that had been previously explored in class, or whether students were genuinely choosing a text that they felt resonated with the concept of journey, particularly as some of these students said that they also relished being able to use the subversive lyrics of an artist who would usually be considered unauthorised in an English classroom. When asked to reflect (after completing the Area of Study) on how their analytical skills had developed, students asserted that it was their independent investigations of texts, rather than their study of Stan, that consolidated their ability to find and investigate techniques. Yet, they acknowledged that studying Stan had provided a model to use in independently scrutinising their own text. One student said, ‘all the confidence from Stan translated to my related text.’ Another student said that it was positive to ‘start the year with someone you know and love’ in order to ‘get into techniques.’ Ambiguities During our analysis of Stan, students had debated the ending, when Slim Shady monosyllabically exclaims, ‘Damn!’ Some argued that this short exclamation shows his sharp awakening as Stan’s journey personally impacts on him. Like Stan, he has confused fiction
with reality, in the opposite way to Stan, but realises the intimate relationship between the news and his own life. However, the extent to which he is impacted by Stan’s journey into delusion and death was considered ambiguous by the class; it is unclear whether he is weighed down by guilt at not replying, or merely angry that Stan would take such a drastic action, confusing illusion and reality. In the same way, there are a number of ambiguities, tensions and contradictions in using Eminem’s work in a Year 11 Standard class in an attempt to build on students’ cultural capital and improve their writing skills. There is an ambiguity in our incorporation of American hip hop texts and pedagogy in an Australian context – South Western Sydney in particular. While the resistance to authority and oppositional narratives of these texts resonated with students, their subjectivities are ambivalently placed in relation to American hip hop culture. Like Stan, they are physically distanced from the culture they mimic and appropriate in an Australian stance. Many of these students were born and live in Australia, from a Language Background Other than English, identifying as ‘Australian’ at home while in the classroom identifying with their cultural background. It is open to question whether it would be more appropriate to be analysing Australian hip hop produced by artists in from a similar cultural background, or whether the ‘entanglement’ of cultures in globalisation (Clifford, 1997) broadens the scope of texts to be analysed in the Australian English classroom. In relation to this, it should be noted that when I asked students why they had chosen related texts by American artists like Tupac rather than hip hop texts from Australia or other cultural backgrounds, students scoffed. A few of the students agreed that there is ‘no one like him [Tupac]’. When asked to elaborate, one student said that there is no other hip hop artist who they felt had the same depth of insight or wealth of techniques as Tupac. When asked why they didn’t choose Arabic hip hop texts, one student said they were ‘hard to analyse’ because they are ‘hard to translate’. There is also a danger in relocating previously marginalised texts to a more central place in the classroom. This process can simultaneously marginalise other members of the classroom community ‘by assuming that all students share a common set of experiences and subjectivities that can be appealed to through a singular set of curricular and pedagogical
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choices’ (Hill, 2009, p. 9). The use of texts and pedagogies that build on students’ cultural capital ‘inevitably creates spaces of both voice and silence, centring and marginalisation, empowerment and domination’ (Hill, 2009, p. 10). Indeed, at the beginning of the school year, when students had written individual letters about their learning preferences, what they wanted to improve and their beliefs on the qualities of a good teacher and good student, one female student had written that she preferred poems to songs and did not like hip hop. She wanted to study ‘classic’ texts. This relates to a further concern in placing non-canonical texts at the centre of classroom discussion: students’ subsequent deprivation ‘of access to bodies of knowledge [Western canonical texts] that are crucial to mainstream educational success’ (Hill, 2009, p. 124). Indeed, in some students’ written pieces of work, they had maintained the colloquial register of the popular culture text rather than elevating their language to the more formal, academic level of English required in public examinations. There are further tensions between the ‘aspirations of dialogue’ and the ‘reality of power’ in the classroom (Pradl, 1996, p. 217). While assuring students that all questions of the text were valued and open for discussion, inevitably some were privileged as more analytical than others. While all interpretations were valid, those expressed with more sophisticated vocabulary in Standard English were awarded higher marks in line with syllabus requirements. Additionally, some advocates of Hip Hop Based Pedagogy (HHBP) would argue that my use of hip hop in the classroom was disingenuous because it was not based in ‘full immersion in cultural forms that engage and inspire students’ (Ladson-Billings, 2009, p. x). Rather than being a ‘hip hop head’ (Kirkland, 2007, p. 131), there was instead an acknowledgement of the literary value and universal themes present in hip hop texts. Yet, the ambiguities in Stan prompted genuine higher order thinking, dialogue and growth in students. Perhaps the ambiguities in using (popular) culturally relevant texts also leave room for real dialogue and evolution in the teaching of English in Australia? Conclusion Notwithstanding the concerns with using hip hop texts in the classroom, there are a number of potential positive outcomes from using texts that build on students’ cultural capital. Witnessing the development of students’ oral and written skills when using these
texts suggests that it is true that ‘achievement gaps’ that our students experience ‘may be more accurately characterised as cultural gaps – between them and their teachers (and the larger society)’ (Ladson-Billings, 2009, p. ix). Ultimately, there is also a gain for teachers who use texts that build on students’ cultural capital in the classroom. There is a sense in which ‘[w]e must learn to be vulnerable enough to allow our world to turn upside down in order to allow the realities of others to edge themselves into our consciousness’ (Delphit, 1988, p. 297, cited by Pradl, 2002, p. 527). When the teacher allows him/ herself to become vulnerable and aware of his/her own ignorance, students’ knowledge becomes privileged in classroom discussion. In this way, teachers are able to ‘erect bridges between student lives and the demands of the common curriculum’ and ‘foster productive patterns of interaction between teacher and student’(Pradl, 2002, p. 527). This can lead to the development of a classroom that embraces difference, collaboration and independent thought.
References Board of Studies (1999). English: Stage 6 Syllabus. Sydney, NSW: Board of Studies. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The Forms of Capital. In: Richardson, J.G. (ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241–2580). Greenwood Press, New York. Chouliaraki, L. & Fairclough, N. (1999). Discourse in late modernity: Rethinking critical discourse analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Diaz, J. (2007). The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books. Eminem, (2000). Stan (Film clip) Retrieved 13 August 2010 from: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=KyHwM8WP0Z4. Eminem, (2000). Stan (Lyrics) Retrieved 13 August 2010 from: http://www.metrolyrics.com/stan-lyrics-eminem. html Fair Go Team (2006). School Is For Me: Pathways to Student Engagement. Sydney, Priority Schools Funding Program: NSW Department of Education and Training. Hammond, J. & Gibbons, P. (2005). Putting scaffolding to work: The contribution of scaffolding in articulating ESL education. Prospect, 20, 1, pp. 6–30. Hill, M.L. (2009). Beats, rhymes and classroom life. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
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Kirkland, D.E. (2007). The power of their texts: Using hip hop to help urban students meet NCTE/IRA national standards for the English language arts. In K.K. Jackson, & S. Vavra, (Eds), Closing the gap: English educators address the tensions between teacher preparation and teaching writing in secondary schools (pp. 129–145). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Kirkland, D.E. (2008). ‘The rose that grew from concrete’: Postmodern blackness and new English education. English Journal, 97, 5, pp. 69–75. Ladson-Billings, G.J. (1996). Silences as weapons: Challenges of a Black professor teaching white students. Theory Into Practice, 35, 2, 79–85. Ladson-Billings, G. (2009). Foreword. In M.M. Hill, Beats, rhymes and classroom life (pp. vii-x). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Lee, C.D., Spencer, M.B. & Harpalani, V. (2003). ‘Every shut eye ain’t sleep’: Studying how people live culturally. Educational Researcher, 32, 5, 6–13. McFadden, M. & Munns, G. (2002). Student Engagement and the Social Relations of Pedagogy, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 23, 3, 357–366. Munns, G. & Woodward, H. (2006). Student Engagement and Student Self-assessment: The REAL Framework. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, 13, 2, 193–213.
Munns, G. (2007). A sense of wonder: pedagogies to engage students who live in poverty, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 11, 3, 301–315. Pradl, G. (1987). Close Encounters of the First Kind: Teaching the Poem at the Point of Utterance. The English Journal, 76, 2, 66–69. Pradl, G., (1996). Democracy and English Education, 1996. English Education, 28, 3, 217–223. Pradl, G. (2002). Linking instructional intervention and professional development: Using the ideas behind Puente High School English to inform educational policy, Educational Policy, 16, 522–546. Pradl, G. (2010). Personal communication to author, 20 January. Sinclair, J.M., & Coulthard, R.M. (1975). Towards an analysis of discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Notes 1 The Premier’s English Scholarship is an award for a study in English of up to 5 weeks. All teachers currently teaching English K-12 in NSW schools and TAFE NSW Institutes are eligible to apply. (See https://www.det.nsw. edu.au/awards/scholarships/)
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