ABSTRACT

In this chapter, I argue for a closer examination of the complex and varied literacy practices that students engage in outside of school. Given hip-hop’s popularity among urban youth and its growing influence on American popular culture, I develop a theoretical and practical framework for connecting the literacy practices of the hip-hop community to the classroom. To illustrate the potential of this framework, I use Bourdieu’s theory of practice to initiate a new perspective on the use of hip-hop literacies within the classroom. Drawing from ethnographic data taken from “Hip-Hop Lit,” a hip-hop-centered highschool English literature course, I demonstrate how the redistribution of capital within the classroom field vis-à-vis popular culture can enrich learning and reconfigure classroom power relations in varied, complicated, and often highly problematic ways. Specifically, I use two ethnographic vignettes to address the following questions: How does the infusion of the popular into the classroom lead to the reconfiguration of classroom knowledge and power? How do teachers and students negotiate these reconfigured notions of knowledge and power?