Students channel hip-hop skills into composition

3:37 p.m., Aug. 20, 2004--When Shuaib Meacham, assistant professor of education, began his research exploring the educational possibilities of hip-hop music, one of his goals was to get young people to relate to school concepts through the medium of their music.

“Without engagement, you can’t connect students to skills in a way that will make them want to learn,” Meacham said. “Hip-hop grabs them right off the bat.”

One of the results of Meacham’s efforts, sponsored in part by grants from the National Academy of Education, the Spencer Foundation and the Verizon Foundation, was the formation of Bassline Entertainment, a hip-hop group composed of students from junior high and high schools in New Castle County.

The impetus for the group began when Jennifer Bishop, one of Meacham’s former students at UD and a teacher at Talley Middle School, noticed a group of seventh-graders who met during lunch to compete with one another in “freestyle” rhyming. Bishop was impressed with the considerable verbal skills the students used in composing their rhymes.

Invited by Bishop to teach these students in a weekly class that would enable them to channel their hip-hop skills into more traditional forms of composition, Meacham began by helping the group to write poetry, and was amazed by the speed and skill they exhibited in writing powerful compositions about their lives.

“I came up to Talley and read them one of my poems. I also gave them an assignment to write their own poems based on the same theme,” Meacham said. “They took about three minutes to come up with something. I listened, and I was stunned. Their work was so impressive, I presented what they wrote at a National Teachers of English conference, and it blew everybody away.”

With the help of Bishop and Tony Anderson, a UD graduate student from Florida State University, the junior high school students set up a studio-type environment in the classroom, and Bassline Entertainment was formed. With funding for the Sound Vision Music Camp from Verizon and UD’s College of Human Services, Education and Public Policy, Anderson immersed the students in the rigors of hip-hop performance culture and helped them become a polished performance group that performs at the local, national and international level.

Shuaib Meacham, assistant professor of education

“As you know, hip-hop is everywhere, and a lot of traditionalists have this concept that it is a good strategy for working with African-American students,” Anderson said. “I would like to make the point that hip-hop is not a strategy—it is their culture. It transcends race, gender, color and creed. It is much deeper and is represented in everything that they do.”

Through a great deal of hard work, including the efforts of Anderson and other UD students, Bassline Entertainment performed at Spelman College in Atlanta and at the Indiana Black Expo in Indianapolis, both in 2003.

This spring, the group traveled to the United Kingdom, where it performed at the University of Sheffield in association with a project sponsored by the United Kingdom Literary Association.

“They invited me to talk over there, and I told them about the things we were doing in Delaware, and said that if they were really interested in the concept of hip-hop as a learning tool, we had a lot of young people who actually perform music that they created through the hip-hop process,” Meacham said.

Meacham said that the Bassline kids put on a great show, despite being under tremendous pressure to succeed. Support for establishing a hip-hop literacy program at Sheffield College was contingent to a significant degree on how well they came across as students and performers.

Besides performing at three of the premiere entertainment venues in the city, the group participated in an open-mike engagement at the Sheffield Community Center and stopped by to see the town’s mayor, who treated them to tea at her parlor in City Hall.

“Community and educational leaders from throughout the city turned out at a dinner honoring the Delaware contingent,” Meacham said. “At the dinner the president of the University of Sheffield said that the implications for combining hip-hop and literacy made him feel he was witnessing the beginning of ‘a great educational project,’ one that could significantly change the face of teaching and learning.”

Tony Anderson, a UD graduate student, has immersed the students in the rigors of hip-hop performance culture and helped them become a polished performance group that performs on the local, national and international level.

Since returning to America, Bassline has been working on a new CD titled BlowBack Effect.

The group also performed July 17 at the Indiana Black Expo in Indianapolis and the World Youth Leadership and Activism conference at Rutgers University on Aug. 12.

Earlier in July, Bassline Entertainment accompanied Meacham to Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., for participation in “A Day of Alternate Discourse: The Literary History of Hip-Hop and Its Affect on the Writing Process,” part of a workshop sponsored by the National Writing Project there.

Meacham said the hip-hop learning program, including lectures, workshops and performances in America and the United Kingdom, has been a valuable experience for the group members, as well as the UD students and graduate students who work with them.

“The kids learned that it is possible to succeed if you discipline yourself, and that great things can be done when you have greater expectations of yourself,” Meacham said. “The UD students also had a firsthand experience being inspired by inner-city youth, and it caused them to think about the possible benefits of such work.”

Article by Jerry Rhodes

E-mail this article

To learn how to subscribe to UDaily, click here.