Rap Genius

In 2013 in The Chronicle of Higher Education, William Pannapacker reviewed data from employees hiring humanities majors and found that the majority of them wanted educators in arts and literature departments to revamp their pedagogy; they demanded “no more digitally challenged liberal arts majors.”  One study of how students learn in the Digital Age, This We Believe, supported this call, though for different reasons; it suggested that teaching students online collaborative literacy, particularly via wikis, leads not only to greater analytical skills but also to fostering deeper social interactions, teaching students to work together as a group.  Teaching traditional texts using Web 2.0 tools that provide platforms for user-generated content teaches students to move beyond what Aaron Doering, Richard Beach, and David O’Brien call “linear processing of information.” This paper concerns how I transformed my Early American Literature survey to teach digital literacy, analytical skills, and persuasive arguments using the website Rap Genius.  It will be delivered with Rap Genius’s “education czar,” Jeremy Dean, an English PhD who left higher education to carry out his vision for the website as an interactive archive. 
Rap Genius – soon to be shortened to Genius – began as a wiki site for rap lyrics, a place where anyone could go to offer an interpretation of hip-hop music; however, it quickly blossomed into a website for all forms of literature, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.  Text is user-uploaded, and participants annotate the “lyrics” (book passages, short fiction, plays, letters, or poetry) with text, video, and images to help explain the work to the larger public (see images 1 & 2 below).  In my case, students uploaded Letters from an American Farmer and Common Sense and then created multimodal footnotes to the texts, adding research, music videos, and student-generated images to accompany standard literary interpretations of these works.  This paper argues that Genius is an “affinity space,” a site organized around students’ shared interests and knowledge, and, as such, it provided a place for the students to blend what they knew and understood – wikis, popular culture, music – to approach what they didn’t – Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur, Thomas Paine, and eighteenth-century literature. It explains how and why students began making (literal, hyperlinked) connections with texts both in our class and outside of it, making cogent arguments about the works with their classmates, and voluntarily reading peer-reviewed research so that they could properly construct an online presence as a reviewer on the site.  And, finally, it argues that this new way of teaching caused students to engage with the texts with greater depth, curiosity, and excitement than ever before because it appealed to what Henry Jenkins has called “participatory culture;” since the students’ annotations could be questioned, upvoted, downvoted, or supported by users both within and without the class, they took more time and effort to engage in the material, which fostered student-driven inquiry-based learning and critical thinking/deep reading practices.
But this project represents only a very small fraction of the possibilities of this website for scholars and teachers of Early American literature. Uploading primary-source documents for annotation, as well as Genius’s budding relationship with scholarly databases like Jstor, mean that the possibilities for creating a broader community of early American readers and scholars beyond the University setting is imminently possible.  The paper concludes by briefly discussing these and other possibilities for this site in the hopes that it will foster more discussion about teaching “online in the old classroom.”