Physics teacher Harjoban Goraya (known as Joe) has a whole range of interests outside school, but one in particular – battle rapping – inspired him to shake up his lessons in the classroom.
He is one of many teachers around the UK bringing traditional subjects up to date with a little pop culture.
“Battle rap is just a small niche in pop culture,” Goraya says. “But when I first started teaching, quite a few kids were into it and would release their own music videos on YouTube. I was very much into that scene myself and realised that there must be a way to utilise these skills in the classroom.”
Goraya, who teaches at Moseley Park academy, in Bilston, near Wolverhampton, got in touch with Don’t Flop, the UK’s largest battle rap league, and together they created a workshop teaching Goraya’s pupils how to revise using rapping. The pupils who took part loved it and were able to use the techniques when preparing for exams. What he learned from that experience, he still uses to this day.
In full flow: physics teacher Harjoban ‘Joe’ Goraya
“In physics, we have a lot of formulas that pupils need to remember so I’ve created some poems to help. They are not good poems, in fact some are horrendously bad, but they do stick really well,” he says with a laugh.
Goraya says that being able to connect with students makes a big difference, recalling one girl who went from being terrified of failing her mocks to getting a grade 7. “Once pupils get their head around an idea that you have made relevant for them, it’s tremendous to see.”
Goraya says his colleagues are supportive. His school already had an idea that he was going to be creative in the classroom because his mock lesson at his interview was on the action film franchise Transformers.
Goraya uses rapping to help his pupils revise
“I played the 1980s Transformers theme tune when the kids walked into the classroom. It really helped me build up rapport and develop relationships a bit quicker,” he says.
In Essex, Bethany Cotton, a maths teacher at Clacton County high school is also focused on the importance of building relationships with her students. It was the topic of her dissertation, and at her school in Clacton-on-Sea she is considered to be the teacher with the deepest understanding of the teenage brain.
Taking a cinematic approach: maths teacher Bethany Cotton
She has been teaching for only a year but has already made an impact. As well as encouraging the chanting and singing of formulas, she has created a display of maths problems that crop up in movies such as Mean Girls, Die Hard with a Vengeance and Night School. She also plays pupils videos of Chris Moyles’ Quiz Night, a Channel 4 show that ran between 2009 and 2012, in which famous pop acts came on and sang a maths problem.
“A lot of students are genuinely afraid of maths so it’s about doing anything I can to make them laugh and put them at ease,” she says. “Making things relevant to them and introducing songs and films into my teaching comes naturally to me. When you make an effort, it really does make a difference.”
Cotton uses a variety of techniques to make maths a more approachable subject for her students
In London, French and Italian teacher Adam Fletcher from St Thomas the Apostle School and Sixth Form had an epiphany while attending a football match. He was taking part in the usual chanting from the stands when he realised bringing chants, raps, songs and verse in his lessons could unite his classes as it does the crowd. He had spent time teaching English as a foreign language in Brazil and had learned much from his fellow teachers there, who always included music and a sense of fun in their lessons.
“I am quite musical and write songs anyway. And it occurred to me that there are moments of dead time in lessons when students are clearing up or writing down their homework, so I decided to write chants for those moments.
Adam Fletcher brought his experience teaching English as a foreign language overseas back to the classroom when he returned to the UK
“They only last 30 seconds but they’re another chance for pupils to use the language and they help make every second of the lesson count,” he says. “I purposefully include frequently used language, which they will need in their exams.”
Fletcher says it helps that he teaches at a boys’ school: “They already enjoy football and are used to chanting so they love it.”
Nadiyah Abdul-Jabbar, who teaches English at Bristol Cathedral Choir School, uses social media and popular music to help make the topics of her lessons more relevant and personal to her students.
Originally from the Cayman Islands, she studied for a degree in communications in the US before completing her PGCE in secondary English at the University of Bristol last summer, and is in her first year of teaching.
English teacher Nadiyah Abdul-Jabbar makes extensive use of pop culture and social media to bring the subject alive for her students
One method she uses is taking opinions from social media to help her students formulate opinions and arguments.
She says: “I pull items from Twitter and link them to the text we are looking at. For example, we studied the themes in the play An Inspector Calls. I then showed students some opinions from Twitter on those themes, and asked them to think about how they would respond and whether they agreed or disagreed.”
Protest poetry is another topic she has covered, and to make it more relevant she played her pupils performances by the rappers Stormzy and Dave. “It was good to show them that the raps were also forms of poetry. The students hadn’t thought that music could be poetry too.”
The impact of introducing pop culture can be quite dramatic. “It makes pupils think about English in a different way,” says Abdul-Jabbar. “With rap, I was able to get really personal responses from them on what they thought about a topic and also the poetic techniques used in the lyrics.”
In teaching every day is different, and so is every teacher. Discover 100 teachers across the country, shaping lives. And if you’d like to know how you can bring your individual passions to a job in teaching, head to Get Into Teaching to find out more.
