Outkast'd and claimin' true: the language of schooling and education in the southern hip-hop community of practice

The hiphop community of practice encompasses a range of aesthetic values, norms, patterns, and traditions. Because of its growth over the last three decades, the community has come to include regionally specific networks linked together by community members who engage in meaningful practices and experiences. Expressed through common language ideologies, these practices contribute to the members communal and individual identity while simultaneously providing platforms to articulate social understandings. Using the constructs of community of practice and social networks, this research project is an interpretive study grounded primarily in the use of lyrics and interviews to investigate the linguistic patterns and language norms of hiphops southern network, placing emphasis on the Atlanta, Georgia southern hiphop network. The two main goals are to gain an understanding of the role of school in the cultivation of the network and identify the networks relationship to schooling and education. The purpose is to identify initial steps for implementing a hiphop pedagogy in curriculum and instruction.