Taking the Rap. . .

Ice Cube as primer?

Oprah as teaching aide?

Street-smart Shakespeare?

Well, why not? sasses Deborah Kellar, actress and “teaching artist.”

Think about it: If it pushes kids into lively conversation about language, forces them to consider phonics, assonance, alliteration, the way sound rolls around in the mouth and off the tongue, it’s certainly worth a try.

And so the rap lyrics, or Shakespeare’s most illustrious protagonists portrayed as homies or preppies, or acting out “Oprah” as in-class paradigm.

It keeps the classroom fluid--and the philosophy behind it isn’t quite as random or radical as it sounds.

“Did anyone else bring their rap lyrics in?”

Kellar bounds across Audubon Middle School’s carpeted library floors with athletic pivot-turn grace. She grabs one loose-leaf page from a waving hand behind her, with a “Thank you, dahlin’ ” oozing with New Orleans Creole gentility.

Hand on hip, Kellar begins, sounding through a tight cursive hand: “The world is mine . . . get back / Don’t mess with my stack / The gage is racked / about to drop the bomb, I’m the West Coast Don. . . .

“Oooh, I like this,” she squeals, rocking back and forth, then turns to address the class in her time’s-a-wasting clip: “Give me some help with this. Let’s take it line by line.”

Hands fly up. Boys and girls, Latino and African American, work through a puzzle of communication, grab for meaning. They reexamine the tools they have to work with: What is the difference between slang and black English--the catch phrase of the moment, Ebonics? What is the difference between a figure of speech and nonstandard English? What is mainstream and what is the language of private time, of friends?

“Let’s translate that,” prompts Kellar and the students offer solutions:

“The gage is racked” becomes “The gun is loaded.”

“Don’t mess with my stack” becomes “Please do not interfere with my money.”

The more refined and buffed the version, the heartier the approval.

“ ‘I’m about to drop the bomb,’ ” Kellar pauses, looks up at her class, “So what does ‘drop the bomb’ mean?

“I’m about to set it off,” says eighth-grader Arthur Reggie III.

“Is that mainstream English?” asks another student from the back of the class. “Or is it black English?”

“But the Hispanics speak it too,” Marco Ortiz pipes in under his breath, confused by the categories, the labels.

“Is there something in the sentence that is not mainstream? That is not grammatically correct? Let’s really look at this,” prompts Kellar, leaning closer to the page and flush against the issue.

In the eye of the Ebonics debate, this approach, Kellar knows, may raise hackles: Politicians intent on banning such teaching; taxpayers grousing about squandered dollars; pundits fretting about great strides backward. Long-in-the-trenches crusaders posing the question: Have we given up?

Or, at the extreme: Have the rhymes of gangsta rappers dislodged careful study of the likes of Steinbeck and Hemingway and Shakespeare? (“No,” Kellar would fire back in a potent pitch, “of course not.”)

“The biggest misunderstanding,” says Selase Williams, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cal State Dominguez Hills, “is that many people think that what is being proposed is to teach Ebonics in the classroom as opposed to using the community language to teach some new skills.”

“People are blowing it all out of proportion,” says Reggie, 13, taking a break from today’s in-class assignment: writing a letter to President Clinton in the voice of Martin Luther King. Theme: the crisis of racism.

“On the radio they’re taking it the wrong way, saying that it’s a big step backward, but I don’t think they understood,” Reggie says. “They’re using black English in school to help us learn mainstream American English. Even when my mom first heard about it [Ebonics], first she thought it was a big step backward, but I told her that’s not new, we’re already doing that in RADAR.”

*

The RADAR project--Recognizing and Dramatizing Alternative Registers--is an attempt to put a creative spin on learning. It piggybacks the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 7-year-old Language and Development Program for African American Students as well as the district’s English-as-a-second-language and bilingual programs.

A pilot program funded by a Weingart Foundation grant, RADAR adds touches of theater to grammar class to help students become better speakers and writers of mainstream English. The L.A. effort grew out of a series of meetings between LAUSD curriculum specialists and Deborah Salzer, executive director of the San Diego-based Playwrights Project.

Launched in San Diego last year, the program provided a way for students who didn’t qualify for bilingual programs to strengthen their mainstream English skills.

“It wasn’t just African American kids,” says Kathryn Johnson-Schwartz, Playwrights Project’s Los Angeles coordinator. “A lot of kids needed this kind of help. It was the sort of thing that used to be done in the old days in speech classes. They approached us because they were real familiar with Playwrights’ ‘on-your-feet’ involvement, that would include not just the writing aspect, but the verbal component as well.”

Kellar--actress, writer, director and founder of the African American theater troupe BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) Ensemble--guides students through exercises that strengthen language skills: improvisations that partner up mainstream with diverse characters; impromptu reenactments of talk shows; writing and performing scenes and monologue; and even crafting their own presidential addresses.

Kellar was picked, Johnson-Schwartz says, not just for her strength as an actress or her sense of humor, but “because there is a real honesty about her, a real straightforwardness that is important, particularly for this age group. They don’t want fairy tales.”

Most critically, she recognizes and affirms their reality--that the world they traverse requires a complex set of tools: One way of speaking to maintain the cultural bond with friends and family, plus another that is essential to success and survival in the marketplace.

Kellar, 45, knows the internal battle of trying to bridge both worlds. She grew up in a home where her parents demanded pronunciation as crisp as a starched seam.

“There was a battle in that house when I dropped it,” confesses Kellar, who did so her friends wouldn’t tag her with the stigma of trying to “act proper.” “My mother would say: ‘That’s not the way we speak,’ or ‘Not in this house.’ But I’d go outside and it was ‘Hey, girl, where you goin’?’ ”

*

Now, her message is that there is a time and place for everything. She wants her students to have the best chance possible, and that starts with being well armed with information--to understand their larger history as well as the undergirdings of a language tradition that’s most distinctive feature is that it is oral.

During slavery, “It was illegal for Africans to speak their mother tongues,” Kellar says. “So we had to learn American English our own way, without the books, relying on our ears. If you can’t read it, then you pick it up by hearing.”

Programs like RADAR plug into that sensitive ear through oral presentation, discussion, staged interaction, mini-plays--all in conjunction with writing.

“We don’t teach the kids Ebonics. We don’t teach in Ebonics.” Kellar gives her head a weary shake, worn down in the media fray. “What we do do is help them understand that their home language comes from a place. Even black people don’t understand this--Ebonics--is something that can help them. Help their kids. Not just black kids but all kids. We’ve got to figure out new ways to engage them.”

Students were chosen on the basis of their abilities--ranging from volunteers to those who were shy but showed potential for success in a different environment, explains Carolyn Williams, an English and social studies teacher. “It enhances my regular program because the students get totally involved. They are more willing to write and are more verbal and self-correcting.”

This is where adding a touch of theater to written drills and quizzes most dramatically comes into play: Language becomes a living thing--and thus something easier to mold in the hands.

“The drama helps me to learn the words,” says 11-year-old Mecki Lewis, an Audubon sixth-grader. “It helps me to pay attention. My mom teaches me correct English at home all the time, but here I learn the whys.”

Classmate LaMarc Saunders agrees. “She teaches us the right stuff we need to learn. It’s very important to know the difference between what you speak outside and what you speak inside.”

It’s done to help them with more than just language, says Marco Ortiz, 13. “We were acting out job interviews and I was using a lot of slang. She asked the class, ‘Does he act like he wants a job?’ I type 60 words a minute, but because of the way I was talking and sitting, people weren’t going to take me seriously.”

Such revelations can shift thinking, even reroute a life’s trajectory.

“Personalities have emerged,” says eighth-grade English teacher Cassandra May. “The roles of the students have evolved, expanded. Through scenes and monologues, they take more chances--we’ve already been able to see breakthroughs with the more introverted ones. We’ve gotten those who wouldn’t listen to pay close attention.”

It’s early yet, but Kellar believes programs like RADAR could teach not just English but critical thinking--both crucial survival skills, especially in this multicultural environment.

“The fear is that this issue is going to turn back the clock and throw us back into a segregated mode of education,” says Williams of Cal State Dominguez Hills. “The question of whether Ebonics should be used for African American students is only part of the puzzle. [In the multicultural classroom,] we should be thinking about using different language in the classroom, one that includes the standard varieties of English.”