Scholar, teacher and writer Jose Luis Vilson offers some useful insights about the halftime show that had some folks of a certain age
Can we talk about Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime performance for a bit?
Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show stirred America’s cultural pot over the last two days. Naysayers’ opinions have run the gamut from “I didn’t get it” to “It was too Black for me,” a sure sign that Lamar’s performance worked.
Nothing about Lamar’s musical tapestry suggests he would dilute his discography for people who refuse to get it. His resplendent use of America’s flag colors against his dark skin and his 400 co-performers’ skins including SZA and Serena Williams, was a body blow to President Trump’s enterprise. Co-President Musk and a plethora of unseen agents attempt to erase the legislative, intellectual, and economic gains of civil rights movements.
Therefore, Lamar’s artistry was the clarion call to cultural and interpersonal arms many of us needed.
Isn’t it wild that the same country that has both an illiteracy and an anti-intellectual problem has spent the last half-day dissecting Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime performance? Analyses have run rampant since Lamar’s 13 minutes were up (here’s one from David Dennis Jr. that works). It speaks volumes about the ways we construct educational experiences. When you read the meanings folks are making from the performance, you see the ways people are integrating knowledge from expertise and experience and forming holistic narratives about this electric display.
The disparate reactions make me skeptical that we “all want the same things” for an education.
They’ll say “But, Jose, we’re not Kendrick Lamar.” You’re right. But if you listen to a teacher who taught Lamar, you recognize that we have multiple Kendricks in our classrooms. According to this interview, Mr. Inge explains how he views all of his students as capable of success. In fact, in other videos, we see Mr. Inge’s pedagogy as firm, direct, and loving at once. These analyses seem based on skills learned from reading whole books and looking at math problems holistically, not simple passages.
It’s a good lesson for schools. Some have derided holistic pedagogies as soft or inefficient. Yet, some of our most brilliant works have come from the amalgamation of these content areas. For instance, treating science and social studies as applied English Language Arts and math gives us keys from which to make our lessons more engaging and exploratory.
