Using Lyrics to Develop Students’ Critical Literacy Lyrics and music of popular songs can represent alternative perspectives

Using Lyrics to Develop Students’ Critical Literacy
    Lyrics and music of popular songs can represent alternative perspectives to the dominant ideologies of a particular time or place. As such, they can be used effectively in classrooms to provide the voices rarely heard in textbooks. In this lecture I discuss how song lyrics can be used as texts to develop students’ critical literacy. I begin with a vignette from my own experience as a science teacher, describing how my students explored environmental issues through songs. And then I relate this to research on critical literacy in classrooms, and argue that critical literacy is essential in democratic societies.
    A number of years ago, I taught young adolescents enrolled in a junior high science elective, "Ecology and Botany". There was no textbook for this class, so I based my teaching on my knowledge of ecology and my personal commitment to protecting the natural environment. I wanted my students to consider how the things we do often affect our environment. I opened our consideration of the broad concept of ecology through a song by Cat Stevens (now known as Yusaf Islam), a well-known folk singer at the time. In "Where Do the Children Play?" Stevens tells the listener, "We’ve come a long way, we’re changing day to day" through advances in technology and engineering, but in doing so, we have destroyed much of our environment. He rhetorically asks, "But tell me, where do the children play?" to encourage the listener to consider some of the human and environmental costs of progress.
    I played the song while students read a copy of the lyrics. These 12-and 13-year-olds, who represented various levels of academic achievement, participated in a thoughtful and analytic discussion based on these verses. I asked them to think about the things they saw around them, to consider if there were things that related to the song that they noticed on their way to school or as they drove around with their parents. They began to talk about events in their community from the new perspective of human impact on the environment. Picking up on Stevens’ lyrics about roads that "just go on and on" and unchecked construction, they focused on the new housing developments and accompanying roads running through what had been farmland in their semi-rural community. Their discussions moved quickly from casual observations of tractors and building materials to ways in which these developments altered their environment and affected plants and animals. They were in the beginning stages of becoming informed citizens.
    From a reading methods perspective, the use of these song lyrics was a "prereading strategy":It served to activate or build on students’ prior knowledge of content to be learned. This song and the ensuing discussion prepared students to read content text about ecological issues. Yet its purpose went beyond the typical prereading strategy in that it created a context in which students reconsidered and reconfigured their background knowledge from the perspective of ecology. They were no longer mere observers of their local, national, or global community, but were subjects who could observe, recognize, critically evaluate, and possibly participate in occurrences that affected their daily lives. My students’ interactions with these lyrics are examples of critical literacy.
    Critical theorists describe schools as places in which students should come to understand how and why knowledge and power are constructed. Critical literacy, one application of critical theory, involves "reading the world":runderstanding how we encode power structures, and our role in these processes. Within this framework, reading has the potential to transform and to assist in preparing students for participation in a democratic society.
    In recent years, critical literacy has gained momentum (although at a very modest pace)in tra-ditional classroom settings across grade levels. Literacy researchers and teachers, often working together, are examining and reporting findings about classrooms in which students are encouraged, for example, to deconstruct gender roles, racist practices, and government policies.
    Researches show how high school students’ responses to African American literature become focused on issues of social justice when teachers provide sociohistorical information related to the text; they also demonstrate that responses that incorporate the arts are more expansive than written or oral responses. Some other educators promote children’s critical conversations that develop from reading or listening to books that build awareness "of how systems of meaning and power affect people and the lives they lead".
    Popular culture is always a culture of conflict, it always involves the struggle to make social meanings that are in the interests of the subordinate and that are not those preferred by the dominant ideology. Some contemporary music is certainly a part of popular culture. As Mahiri tells us, it provides "central texts in the pop culture canon". Therefore, bringing pop culture into classrooms establishes "conditions of learning that enable students to locate themselves in history and to interrogate the adequacy of that location as both a pedagogical and political question".
    The lyrics I’ll use as examples in the next part of my lecture, as you’ll see, are drawn from songs of various types, including folk, alternative rock, rock, rhythm and blues, soul, and hip-hop. Their common thread is their portrayal of events or circumstances that promote critical literacy through their storytelling or poetic presentation of social injustice, government action, or disenfranchisement of various groups of people.
    As a short conclusion of this part, research shows us that students across grades can participate in critical conversations and that reading must include a reading of the world, of the sociopolitical-economic contexts in which men and women live, and that we must imagine a more just future.