In partnership with academics from McGill University and community arts partners, a high school in Montreal faced with significant challenges became an “urban arts school,” offering music and visual art programs centered in youth culture, as well as integrating arts into several academic subjects. The initiative was inspired by the school’s popular extra-curricular activities, which included a Hip Hop literacy club that ran beat making and rap writing workshops. Considering the popularity of these activities, the school decided to offer a music education program focused on musical skills through real-life music making activities that resemble those employed by popular musicians. This article chronicles the development of this music education program from the perspective of the music teacher, including the experience of continual adaptation to the needs and interests of students. The program is one of the first to combine Musical Futures, an approach to music education that promotes the combination of non-formal music teaching, informal music learning, and students’ interest in a formal school setting, with Hip Hop Based Music Education, predominantly located in community settings. This case study showed that students benefited from having an open-minded and committed educator with experience in popular musics. The co-teaching by professional Hip Hop artists also supported student progress and engagement by adding authenticity to the music making process. Furthermore, the alignment of the music program with the general school ethos contributed to its success. The paper also highlights the need to balance the development of musical skills with student engagement, and the informal music learning philosophy of Musical Futures with direct instruction associated with formal school settings.

We examine the uses of and attitudes towards language of members of the Montreal Hip‐Hop community in relation to Quebec language‐in‐education policies. These policies, implemented in the 1970s, have ensured that French has become the common public language of an ethnically diverse young adult population in Montreal. We argue, using Blommaert's (2005) model of orders of indexicality, that the dominant language hierarchy orders established by government policy have been both flattened and reordered by members of the Montreal Hip‐Hop community, whose multilingual lyrics insist: (1) that while French is the lingua franca, it is a much more inclusive category which includes ‘Bad French,’ regional and class dialects, and European French; and (2) that all languages spoken by community members are valuable as linguistic resources for creativity and communication with multiple audiences. We draw from a database which includes interviews with and lyrics from rappers of Haitian, Latin‐American, African‐American and Québécois origin.

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Although the number of calls to integrate Hip-Hop culture into school curricula is growing, little attention is being paid to the reluctance of teachers and administrators to forge relationships between the cultures of school and of youth. This article explores some of the difficulties inherent in the relationships between Hip Hop and schooling, including interpretive tensions between White administrators and teachers and African American youth, and argues that the very controversies surrounding rap music are central to its pedagogic value. The article draws on qualitative research from a 2-year classroom study in an urban high on a "spoken word" poetry curriculum which included rap music.

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