Dancing through Issues of Class and Race in the Composition Classroom

Within the writing classroom, teachers (and students) tend to understand writing and rhetoric as a mental activity, rarely considering the body?s role in effective communication?even more rarely do they incorporate the body into everyday pedagogy. Bringing hip-hop into the writing classroom helps students see and learn how communication and rhetoric can be expressed through movements and words. It also allows students to examine issues related to race and other minorities who use hip-hop as an outlet for emotive expression and working through struggles they face on a daily basis. This pedagogy opens up deeper conversations about race, class, and the placement of identity, providing students more active practice in working with these issues. The pedagogical strategies in this paper highlight the intersections of emotion, writing, movement, and rhetoric, and also explore strategies that help students better understand the rhetorical sphere and how bodily movement works within it