My students came to my classroom with many of the skills that I was expected to teach them. They could analyze text. They could develop and support an argument. They understood concepts of theme, characterization, rhyme, rhythm, meter and tone. I watched them display these skill sets almost every day when they would talk about things that were relevant to them as teenagers—this is what I refer to as youth culture. However, I also saw my students frequently internalizing and falling prey to popularized negative images of urban youth as menaces from the margins. They often passively received these media messages through their youth culture, and so they remained unclear about ways that they could critique and disrupt these lowered expectations of them.

To bridge this gap between youth culture and the culture of my classroom, I began with one basic premise. I worked from the notion that a classroom curriculum does not have to be boring to students. I shuddered at the idea that school was a place where students had to sacrifice themselves and the things they enjoyed to pursue “real knowledge”. This idea rested on the basic assumption that a central tenet of good teaching is to find ways to make learning fun—strangely, we seem to violate this time honored wisdom with remarkable regularity. At the most basic level, this meant learning about the interests of my students and then finding ways to incorporate them into virtually every aspect of my class.

I did not, however, want my class to become a live version of “The Box” ( a popular music video channel). I wanted my students to see that the texts they were choosing to access were really quite similar to the texts that they often rejected as irrelevant. I believed to my core that a rigorous curriculum could be a marriage of youth culture and canonical culture, and that this would bring the vigor and vitality of my students back into the classroom.

In addition to increased student engagement, this approach to teaching also works nicely to create meaningful assessments of student learning. Like the curriculum itself, the academic assessments (debates, court trials, presentations) drew heavily upon the cultural strengths of my students (argument, reflection and critique) as a bridge into the academic literacies (textual analysis, critical literacy, developing and supporting oral and written arguments) demanded of them from the academy. These activities acted as a scaffold into advanced level writing exercises (opening/closing arguments for debates/court trials, psychoanalytical critiques of film characters vs. novel characters, original poetry using classic forms) that allowed students the opportunity to show more traditional representations of their academic literacy skills.

^tcla

Jeff Duncan-Andrade is a post-doctoral fellow at UCLA's IDEA where he facilitates "Teachers as Agents for Equity and Change." Prior to moving to L.A., he taught English and coached basketball in Oakland for ten years.