The silences waiting: Young Nunga males, curriculum and rap

THIS PAPER PLAYS WITH THE IDEA OF EDUCATION for young Nunga males as a 'silence waiting for sound': a promising but all too often unfulfilling space. It looks at transformative development of curriculum strategies and interventions that engage Nunga students in learning through the use of re-contextualised popular cultural forms of rap and hip hop. It investigates opportunities for the performance of constructive masculinity, Blackness, Nunganess and the articulation of identity and agency and offers students opportunities to find a way to feel at 'home' - in body, spirit, school, family, community and a wider world of learning. My pen is my weapon, I sharpen its tip I stab these pages, making changes, through the ages In various stages, to explore, implore, pour the words Come about, let shout. Tryin to figure it. Out. Method in my madness to Articulate, make haste, to rectify, reinvent the rhetoric. What's truth when people are playin, sayin, complainin About right and wrong, to map the past, present, future Ensure the right, almighty fight, in places of power. Knowledge gained, ashamed. Insult, consult, translate. Related. The roles we take, the position we make, forsake others for The spaces we shape. My pen is my weapon, I sharpen its tip, to flip the other side Of the coin, to see, hear, know, flow⋯ The silences waiting.