Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s “Critical Pedagogy and Popular Culture in an Urban Secondary English Classroom”

               Well now I know why the TPA lesson format stresses to us that we should connect our lessons in a way to our students’ cultural and communal background. In order to get students interested in doing research projects and to gather background information on their culture, the researchers let some students choose what they wanted to do and about four of them were interested in doing a project/study on hip-hop. Hip-hop, I feel, can be a great representation of urban backgrounds and cultures, so long as they choose the right artists to study and no just talk about trap music or whips. Artists like Vince Staples, Kendrick Lamar, Biggie, will all give you great insights to their personal lives and all talk about how they grew up in maybe similar cases to the students chosen for the study. All of this leads back to classroom management and holding the students interests or sparking interest in them; creating motivation. I also agree with their conclusion that students (and everyone, for that matter) should critically think about and analyze the news that the mainstream media provides for us. More than once have I came across a major story (that was confirmed) on a website or cable channel that seemed to be ignored on the main media channels, and conversely media channels seem to run stories every now and then that either are non-news or are, in rare cases, completely made up in order to boost ratings. Students do need to be listened rather than talked at. By letting them tell us what they want to learn, we can pick out what we need to teach them and how to go around teaching it. Students need to be ready for the 21^st century and all that it brings in media and education, so teachers must be one step ahead of them, preparing them for this task.