Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Nationalism, Identity and Popular Culture 81
may be used in popular cultural forms such as hip hop makes new forms
of identifi cation possible. New language use presents us not only with
basic pedagogical questions of form and access – what should be taught
to whom – but also with questions of how cultural forms are interrelated
with language use, and how the appropriation of language and culture
presents different possibilities for imagined identities, imagined traditions
and imagined languages.
Opening educational doors to popular culture does not mean, as Willis
reminds us, ‘a lazy throwing open of the school doors to the latest fad, but
rather committing to a principled understanding of the complexity of contemporary
cultural experience’ (Willis, 2003: 411). The location of classrooms
within global transcultural fl ows, however, implies that they can
no longer be considered as bounded sites, with students entering from
fi xed locations, with identities drawing on local traditions, with curricula
as static bodies of knowledge. Popular music, as Connell and Gibson
(2003) argue, unsettles common distinctions between the local and global,
the traditional and contemporary, and refl ects the fl ows, fl uxes and fl uidity
of life in an era of globalization. Students refuse attempts to be pinned
down, despite the array of educational technologies (tests, uniforms,
architecture, psychological theories of identity) designed to do so. Popular
music ‘remains an important cultural sphere in which identities are
affi rmed, challenged, taken apart and reconstructed’ (Connell & Gibson,
2003: 117). If we believe that education needs to proceed by taking student
knowledge, identity and desire into account, we need to engage with multiple
ways of speaking, being, and learning, with multilayered modes of
identity at global, regional, national and local levels.
Such a view has numerous repercussions for language education. First,
we need to question the ways in which we teach languages as bounded
entities. From both theoretical and practical stances, it is becoming increasingly
clear that to talk of ‘French’, ‘English’, ‘Japanese’, ‘Chinese’ and so
on – as if these were discrete languages that existed in isolation – is to
overlook the ways in which languages are always interrelated. The mixed
codes of the hip-hop world resist the monolingual obsessions of nations
and their educational institutions, opposing, for example, the many interests
and complicities that have supported the use of English and only
English in classrooms, where English has been seen as a language that
operates only in its own presence. As Huq (2001: 75) notes in the context
of using French rap in French classes, the messages, languages and ethnicities
of French rap are ‘redefi ning what it is to be French’. The lessons
we draw from the multilingualism of hip hop demand that we reintroduce
translation in all its complexity into English language teaching, that we
open up and explore the many possible meanings that can start to fl ow in
and out of languages in relation to English, and that we stop treating
languages as objects in isolation (Pennycook, 2008).