Pedagogically, I love Malik’s style, and it was clear by
talking to some of Adrienne’s students afterwards that Malik said many things
students have heard for the first time, from facts about multi-national
capitalism (the lines that connect the corporate media industry to the owners
of private prisons for instance) and environmental destruction (some students
had never realized that cell phones are made of oil which is made of fossils)
to other insightful perspectives and world views that challenge Eurocentric
views from two different fronts (stressing the common ground between
Afrocentric perspectives and the Lakota people).
Although Malik’s primarily utilized the monologic lecture
strategy (as is fitting to his role as visiting speaker) he was able to gage
his student/audience’s response and interest successfully throughout (whether
through verbal nods, eye contact, etc) and spoke as an equal in a learning
community with humility and presence….or you could say charisma. Mr. Diamond
understands that as a teacher these days, you’re essentially competing with TV
and its various mistruths and distortions, and knows that he has to be
entertaining. To some this approach may have more in common with a motivational
speaker, preacher or even stand-up comic at its best.
He wove a spell of language that honored the fast flow of
thoughts, yet slowed down enough for dramatic effect, leaving room for students
to digest: he filled the white board several times (and in a sense played the
marker like a musical instrument).
Though he himself didn’t rap, or talk specifically about
particular hip hop songs, he broke down the distinction between “MC” and
“teacher.” The pedagogy of the MC became clearer when spoke of how “A rapper is
not the same as an MC.” To illustrate this point, he mentions that when hip hop
began 40 years ago, the live event was much more important than the recording,
but today this is flipped, he remarked, as he sees (all too) many rappers today
gazing at their shoes, not understanding the importance of working the crowd,
or of call and response.
Mr. Diamond understands call and response. We could easily
translate this into the more traditional terms of pedagogy, although some would
say it’s in bad taste to think of students as one’s “audience.” Yet even though
MD’s presentation could be termed and entertaining and artful rant (I mean rant
non-pejoratively, or, better, a structured improvisation, highly sensitive to
the social context, but varying and returning to a theme, like word-jazz at its
best. I don’t think it would be fair to reduce it to the banking model.
Of course, as a teacher of writing and reading, I am obligated to sublimate the kind of
pedagogy MD exhibited with the more paper-mediated (or e-paper mediated) forms
of exchanging knowledge and opinions. But, importantly, the oral mastery that
MD brings to the classroom (in both lecture and Q&A format) shows students
how an (in most cases older) man who has obviously read a lot (at one point,
Malik almost apologized for his encyclopedic knowledge) can take what he read
and truly appropriate it, make it his
own….in “developing unique perspectives”
(as the SLO for English 1A would put it). And sometimes this cannot be
learned from a book, or from a text-centered method of teaching. And, despite
the statistically minded orientation of a regime of standardized testing, the
kind of embodiment of critical thinking that Malik’s presentation espoused
shows how the medium becomes as
important, and almost one with, the message.
Or, to put more clearly: students didn’t just appreciate the
knowledge he shared, but the way he wears
that knowledge, as if to notice “Wow, reading a lot of books doesn’t just make
you a better writer, but can make you a better talker!” And that indeed is a
social (marketable) skill. Of course, part 2 of his visit will focus more in
detail on how he wears that knowledge through his hip hop activism. This is a
man who has a vision of how the world can be better….and even if you disagree
with him (which of course he encourages), what he says can generate an infinite
number of paper topics….
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