The Fifth Element: Social Justice Pedagogy through Spoken Word Poetry (Book Review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Fifth Element: Social Justice Pedagogy Through Spoken Word Poetry (2016) explores the potential of spoken word poetry to build relationships and to initiate change.Endsley employs "fictionalized autoethnography" (p.137), weaving together recollections of her experiences with a collective of spoken word artists, creative writing (both her own and students'), and personal critical reflections and theoretical interpretations of the art they created together.The goal is to produce a text that is intentionally disruptive and to argue that "spoken word poetry can be a powerful agent of change" (p.66).She draws on the work of bell hooks and many others to theorize the connections between activism and art.Endsley's work often slips out of easy definitions, circling back and building throughout, a style that is clearly part of her strategy (and as is fitting for a book in SUNY Press's Praxis: Theory in Action series).Early on, she traces spoken word's debt to hip hop, its "rowdy 'cousin'" (p.xvii), and explains that her title comes from this realm: the fifth element is understood within the hip hop community as "knowledge of self" (p.xvii), and in both hip hop and spoken word, self-knowledge is a central "social responsibility" (p.xvii) for poet and for audience.Both hip hop and spoken word poetry, Endsley maintains, create communal "spaces for the creative and energetic pursuit of social justice" (p.xviii).Spoken word performance can increase self-knowledge in both poet and audience, a process that ideally leads to challenge and growth, both individual and collective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".