Urban Word

Urban word
On Saturday October 3rd I attended Urban Words Preemptive Education Language, Identity and Power annual mentor, teacher educator and community activist training program at NYU’s Silver Center. The day started off with registration and breakfast, followed by all the participants meeting in a room where David Kirkland kicked off the day.
His kick off stood out to me. He started speaking about language and liberation. The first activity he provided us was a language variation activity, where we worked in groups forming sentences with words that only contained two syllables. This activity made me feel limited with what I could say, as well as forced to think of new ways to search for words to say. I also noticed myself speaking at a slower pace than I normally do and feeling less confident when speaking with my peers. After this, he led us in the “coin game”. For this game we were split up into 3 different groups: gold, red, and blue. What I learned from this activity was the language of the gold group was valued most. The gold group was given more advantages and had good luck. What I learned from this is that people are afraid to be moved into the bottom because they know how hard it is to work your way up to the top group. The only way people were allowed to move from the blue or red group to the gold group was to lie and cheat. We played several rounds of this game. At the end of each round the team with the most points was awarded being able to pick a rule that all the other groups had to follow. This relates to the point of how urban youths language will be less valued then middle and upper class American’s language.

He then went on to show us a song called “U Turn”, written by a student. This stood out to me because it was a beautiful written piece of poetry that had many poetic elements. Instead of this student’s teacher being proud of his work, the teacher was upset about his spelling. As a teacher it is important for us to find value in everything our students do.

At the conference I attended the workshop Between the Beats: Finding and Creating Stories in Hip-Hop Music presented by Crystal Belle, a current high school teacher in New York City. We started the workshop off brain storming what makes the stories we read. This workshop taught me how I can incorporate hip hop music in the classroom as model for teaching storytelling skills to my students. We listened to songs by several hip hop artist. While listening to the each song we identified the literary devices that were used in that song. The literacy devices we focused on were setting, plot, theme, and conflict to name a few. By the end of the workshop I was able to see the correlation between listening to hip hop music as story, and how it allows me and students to create our own stories that explain who we are.