Zip-Zap! Hip-hop! Rap! Walk the Talk then Dance It!
By: David Kluge
“We are all dancing as we are living […]. There is a dance of blood and fluid circulating in our bodies and the expressivity of gesture is a daily activity” Celeste Snowber
“To the five traditional senses – touch, sight, hearing, taste, smell – we must add the sense of movement, or kinesthesia. Its characteristic feature is that it makes use of many receptors, but remarkably it has been forgotten in the count of the senses.
By what twist did language suppress the sense most important to survival?” Bertholz cited in Moore & Yamamoto, 2011
With over 40 years of teaching experience at the secondary and tertiary level in the U.S. and in Japan, I have wondered the same thing that Bertholz does: Why do so many teachers ignore the kinesthetic aspects of learning? The majority of the teaching profession seems to treat students as unembodied intellect. Still ignored today are early twenty-first century neurolinguistic concepts such as embodiment (Kiverstein & Miller, 2015) which addresses using the body in learning and multimodal learning (Kinsbourne, 2003) which focusses on the strengthening of memory through using multiple channels to learn something. We seem to disregard what we see and what we hear: when we see effective learning, we see students moving their bodies, and we hear the buzz of excited learning and exploring; we see students glowing with the pride of successful learning, and we hear the joy in their voices. I see and hear these successes with all kinds of Performance in Education (PIE) activities (e.g., readers theatre, speech, debate, puppetry, and various other PIE activities.) Most relevant for this issue of Think Tank, I have seen such success in units on hip-hop that I have taught over the years.
What is hip-hop?
Encyclopaedia Britannica defines hip-hop this way:
Although widely considered a synonym for rap music, the term hip-hop refers to a complex culture comprising four elements: deejaying, or “turntabling”; rapping, also known as “MCing” or “rhyming”; graffiti painting, also known as “graf” or “writing”; and “B-boying,” which encompasses hip-hop dance, style, and attitude, along with the sort of virile body language that philosopher Cornel West described as “postural semantics.” (A fifth element, “knowledge of self/consciousness,” is sometimes added to the list of hip-hop elements, particularly by socially conscious hip-hop artists and scholars.) Hip-hop originated in the predominantly African American economically depressed South Bronx section of New York City in the late 1970s.
This definition lists five characteristics of hip-hop:
- Style of playing the music when performed live: “deejaying or turntabling” vinyl records on high-tech turntables
- Style of performing the lyrics/words: “rapping” or “MCing” or “rhyming”
- The graphic art created by street artists: “graffiti painting” or “graf” or “writing”
- The style of hip-hop dancers: “B-boying” which is hip-hop dance style, including fashion style, and attitude, the artists’ body language, their so-called “postural semantics”
- Knowledge of self/consciousness: this concept refers to the artist as a member of a society/social group, and also as an agent of change.
Most casual listeners think the artists are solo, but originally, in mostly poorer areas of New York City in the late 1970s as well as other similar places that gave birth to hip-hop, these artists had back dancers and back-up singers, and the audience did not sit quietly in front of the performers but encircled them, creating a circular-shaped micro-society that supported and protected the artists, adding their call-and-response type reactions (Diallo, 2019) and physically creating a safe community with their bodies.
As many elements possible that are listed above are used in the Hip-hop unit, except for graffiti painting. (No, I did not require students to tag the university buildings in order to pass the unit!) One other element that was not mentioned in the encyclopedia article was that of language: in previous music styles, Blacks generally used Standard American English. However, hip-hop proudly used Black English Variant with a lot of street slang. The question that this raised is “Whose English is it?” My immediate answer was: it is supposed to be “proper” English, but as an English language professional in Japan coming from a World Englishes point of view, I had to wrestle with this when it came to “Japanese English.” As usually happens in such cases with me, I reached a compromise where the flavor of the students’ language was acceptable, including Japanese slang, but I did give my students some optional suggestions for changes.
Setting the stage
The hip-hop unit was one of four units of a 14-class meeting (100 minutes per class) elective workshop course on Performance in Education for 24 second to fourth year students, mostly Engineering majors (CEFR A1+ level). One important note was that there were three ebullient girls (Engineering majors) who were in my required first year English class who, at the end of the class, asked if they could take my class in the second year, which was the elective Performance class. These three girls enlisted the 21 boys, also Engineering majors. It was clear at the beginning of the class that the boys were more interested in the three girls than they were in English! The last unit of the course was called Hip-hop and Rap and the course description stated that each student would write their own rap based on their life, would learn some basic hip-hop gestures and dance moves, then create their own hip-hop dance routines in small groups. They would practice their self-written raps individually and then in small groups, rehearse the performance, and finally perform for the class.
Basics of the hip-hop activity
To introduce the students to the unit, I showed them a video of Joseph Allen, a young American university student’s audition for America’s Got Talent. The video demonstrated almost all the aspects of the definition of hip-hop, giving the students an idea of what they had to do and inspiring them. I then outlined the three basic areas that need to be worked on in this project: the talk, the walk, and the dance.
Basics of the talk
The Talk is the rap part of the project and was composed of learning alliteration, rhyme, and the theme of the rap. I quickly taught alliteration by going through a short activity that involved the students coming up with an alliterative hip-hop name for themselves. I was Dancing David. Students quickly caught on and started calling each other by their hip-hop names, and attendance was taken using these names.
Rhyme was more difficult because even though the students enjoyed music, including rap, it was mostly Japanese music, and Japanese music typically does not involve rhyme. Tsujimura & Davis (2005) give an excellent analysis of this situation, explaining that rhyming is syllable-based but the Japanese language is not based on syllables but morae, a unit of timing that can be shorter than a syllable. One example is the Japanese name for Japan is “Nippon,” which in English is made up of two syllables but in Japanese is made up of four morae: Ni-pp-o-n. In Japanese the concept of syllable practically does not exist so it has to be taught as a foreign concept. I started by using the video with lyrics of “Twinkle-Twinkle Little Star,” which is very familiar to Japanese children:
Twinkle, twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle, twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are
In addition, we played a rhyming game in groups where everyone claps hands twice and the first person says a word from a list of simple words like “cat.” After two more claps, the next person has to say a word that rhymes with “cat” such as “hat,” and so on, keeping to the rhythm and rhyme.
Finally, the theme of the rap had to follow Joseph Allen’s rap: his past, his present, and his future. Each student’s rap had to be 8 lines with 8 beats to the line: 2 rhyming lines about when they were young, 4 rhyming lines about their general dream, 2 rhyming lines about their specific goal.
They worked individually on the rough draft, worked in performance groups on polishing the lines, then submitted the rap to the teacher for advice.
Basics of the walk
The Walk was composed of the hip-hop poses that showed the brash attitude of hip-hop performers, the hip-hop dance steps and simple dance routines, and the street fashion.
Hip-hop poses
Generally, the girls in the class had more dance experience and were less inhibited in trying new poses (and dance moves), but there were some boys who showed they were good hip-hop dancers. I first showed a video of Basic Photography Hip-Hop Poses that the students practiced, and then a video of some Advanced Photography Hip-Hop Poses. Oddly enough, the students enjoyed the more advanced poses because they felt they were more authentically “hip-hoppy.” I then showed some advanced hip-hop dance photography for younger kids and some poses for older teenagers for students to study on their own. (I want to make it clear at this point that I am NOT a hip-hop dancer and only showed students what to do and allowed them space and time to practice on their own for this and the following stages of this unit.)
Hip-hop dance steps and routines
After a short time for students to feel comfortable with the poses, it was time to move on to dance moves, steps, and routines. As any good teacher knows, you start out with simple steps and move to longer and more complex steps. I chose basic steps like the Arm Wave, the Criss Cross, Floor Work, and the Running Man. Students became more confident and motivated. We then moved to putting dance steps together in a short 4-step easy routine and then an easy but more complex routine.
Add Hip-hop dance beats
There are several websites that provide free hip-hop dance beats samples. Groups of 4-5 students chose their own dance beat and then with these basic dance moves, steps, and short routines, created their own dance routine. They practiced their routine in groups in class, outside of class at school, and by themselves at home.
Hip-hop street fashion
The next step was to create their street fashion, including caps and accessories. There are a lot of hip-hop fashions to choose from, but we chose colorful tracksuits or baggy clothes, basketball and skateboarding shoes, hoodies, and snapback hats (baseball hats that have a snap in the back to make the hat fit on the head so it won’t fall off with energetic dances). It was optional to wear accessories like shiny loose necklaces (“bling”).
Producing the Hip-hop event
To prepare for the event, the back of the room was cleared of desks and chairs to make a large performance area. One wireless large microphone was placed on the floor of the performance area. The groups decided the performance order (rock, scissors, paper, of course!). Each group had previously decided the order of rappers within the group. The first group went to the center of the performance area. The teacher set up the video camera on a tripod and started the recording. The other groups arranged themselves as the audience in a semi-circle around the performers. (The opening of the semi-circle was to allow the video camera a clear view to record the entire project.) Then the audience practiced how to show support through rap call and response:
Call Response
“Yeah?” “Yeah!”
“Check it out!” “Yo!”
“Can you hear me?” “Yes, we can!”
Here is the protocol for the performance:
- Group members start with a pose. (They don’t all have to be the same pose.)
- Whole group dances the routine they created through one iteration of the beat (8 counts).
- One person moves centerstage, picks up the wireless mic from the floor and performs rap while other group members are back dancers.
- Back dancers call out.
- Audience responds.
- Rapper hands mic to next rapper as he or she moves to the back dancers.
- Repeat until each rapper raps, with the last rapper drops the mic on the cushion on the floor.
- Group dances through one last iteration of the beat (8 counts).
- Group ends with different pose. (They don’t have to be in the same pose.)
- Audience applauds with calls of approval. (“Nice!” “Great!” “Wow!” etc.)
- Next group enters the center stage as the group that performed does high five as they replace the space in the audience that was held by the previous group.
- Next group performs.
- Last group returns to the circle and the audience applauds and calls their approval.
Evaluation
The project ended with each group doing an immediate reaction session. I called each group, one at a time, to the center of the circle, with the audience sitting on the carpeted floor in their groups. The rule was that each person in a group had to evaluate one group. I asked for comments and hands flew into the air as if they were eager elementary students instead of college upperclass students. As a student finished their astute and laudatory comments, the whole class applauded as the performers grinned. Then I gave my oral comments. This was conducted for each performing group. Later, after the entire video was seen by everyone, each individual did a Google Form self-evaluation, a small group evaluation, and then a whole class evaluation.
Conclusion
This unit was a model Performance in Education unit. It included a language component (rhyme and alliteration, poetry, composition), a culture component (hip-hop culture and fashion), a music component (putting their compositions to a music rhythm), a dance component (back dancer dance), and evaluation component, as well as involving creativity, group work, and whole class performance. It is important for teachers who are interested in replicating the unit to understand that the teacher was not a hip-hop dancer and the students were not high-level students and not especially talented dancers or hip-hop performers. As a matter of fact, nobody knew that they would be performing hip-hop!
These are the key points of this project:
- Students taught each other (in English if they can–scaffolding) which led to group cohesion and individual confidence.
- The teacher got out of the way of the students’ learning and took an advisory role which led to student independence.
- Each stage was practiced for some time in each class meeting (The Talk, The Walk, The Dance).
- No time limit was put on the activities. When the students felt confident that they were ready, that was when we performed. This led to the students being proud of what they had done.
This was one of the most successful PIE projects I have ever taught. The students were proud of the final product and the teacher was proud of the process and the final product, and, of course, the students.
Videos
DANCING THROUGH LANGUAGE LEARNING: THE USE OF DANCE IN ESOL AND MFL CLASSROOM
This video explores kinetic reading, a unique approach that combines movement and language learning to boost confidence and engagement. Watch as learners of all ages use dance and rhythm to connect with language in a whole new way!
THE BIRTH OF HIP HOP
Find out more about the origins of hip-hop, tracing its journey from DJ Kool Herc’s groundbreaking Bronx party in 1973 to its rise as a global cultural force. From underground cassette tapes to mainstream success, hip-hop became a voice for marginalized communities, blending music, identity, and activism into one of the most influential genres in the world.
A BRIEF(ISH) HISTORY OF HIP HOP
This overview traces hip-hop’s journey from Bronx block parties to global influence, highlighting its innovations, activism, and genre-blending evolution. As hip-hop diversifies and challenges traditions, it continues to shape music, culture, and identity worldwide.
References
Diallo D. (2019). Collective participation and audience engagement in rap music. Palgrave Pivot Cham.
Dobrochna, F., Barch, M., & Gadd, Z. (2020). Dancing through language learning: The use of dance in ESOL and MFL classroom. Creative Multilingualism Conference, Oxford.
Kinsbourne. M. (2003). The multimodal mind: How the senses combine in the brain. Semioticon: Virtual Seminar. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237740636_The_Multimodal_Mind_How_the_senses_combine_in_the_brain
Kiverstein, J., & Miller, M. (2015). The embodied brain: Towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00237
Tsujimura, N., & Davis, S. (2009). Rhyme and the reinterpretation of hip hop in Japan. Indiana University. https://cl.indiana.edu/davis/TsujimuraDavisDragonAsh2009.pdf
David Kluge has been teaching English and Theatre in high schools and universities in the US and Japan for 44 years. He is a senior citizen who cannot dance and has become tone deaf but unfortunately (for his friends) loves to try to dance and sing as often as possible.