Hip Hop as Pedagogy: Something from Something

Abstract

Hip Hop as Pedagogy:Something from Something Daniel Banks (bio) “Young world, your work has the power to provoke movement from silence to empowerment based in liberatory pedagogy and youth development. It democratizes a civic population of youth by giving them a platform to speak. Your elders in rhyme challenge you to find your own voice, to work hard to apply it, and to do so responsibly. If you’re not afraid of your own potential, we promise that we won’t be. Hey Young World, the word is yours.” —Mark Bamuthi Joseph1 “When you go into any culture, I don’t care what the culture is, you have to go with some humility. You have to understand the language, and by that I do not mean what we speak, you’ve got to understand the language, the interior language of the people. You’ve got to be able to enter their philosophy, their worldview. You’ve got to speak both the spoken language and the metalanguage of the people.” —Wole Soyinka2 In his paradigm-shifting chapter “(Yet Another) Letter to a Young Poet,” Mark Bamuthi Joseph (aka Bamuthi) describes the learning process used by Youth Speaks, a San Francisco–based arts and education project that encourages young people to express themselves through spoken-word poetry. He describes a process of “flipping the script” pedagogically—in other words, inverting expectations and conventions in bringing poetry and literature to the classroom. Rather than beginning with a “classic” text, which “presents texts as separate and more relevant (worthy of study) than the realities of the students” (Joseph, qtd. in Chang 2006, 14), Youth Speaks first asks students to write something relevant to themselves and their lives. Then, after this experience of work and self-expression, the youth are asked to put their writing in “dialogue” with an iconic text.3 Youth Speaks is one of the best-known organizations practicing what is often named either Hip Hop education (HHED) or Hip Hop pedagogy (HHPED).4 HHED tends to focus on the content of the class or lesson by introducing some aspect of Hip Hop production into a lesson, for example a rap song. The potential of HHPED is that it is a total reimagining of the classroom experience and speaks to the cultural intelligences of the students, which include the language, history, rituals, and mores of the 40-year-old, global, youth-oriented, social justice movement known as Hip Hop. Accordingly, I use the term generations to reference the fact that, since the 1970s, several generations and millions of youth have been born under the sign of Hip Hop and influenced by a culture of art and activism. HHPED engages both the structure of the learning environment as well as the cultural ethos of Hip Hop, in addition to, and sometimes more significantly than, the content. Although the terms HHED and HHPED are often used interchangeably, I suggest that each practice is unique. The foundation of the cultural ethos is what makes Hip Hop a model for pedagogy in and of itself. HHPED asks, “How do educators learn about and engage the cultural intelligences of their students?” In this essay I explain why Hip Hop as pedagogy presents an effective way of engaging today’s youth learners while simultaneously modeling participant-centered approaches to leadership and student/community engagement. [End Page 243] HHED and HHPED each owe a debt to critical pedagogy and Paulo Freire’s work of “Education as the practice of freedom—as opposed to education as the practice of domination” (69). Reconsidering the relationship between classroom content and structure has direct application to teaching in a theatre environment—both academic classes and studio classes—and may in fact lead to a reimagining of the frequent separation between the two and/or the privileging of one over the other. Innovations in the field already point toward Freire’s notion of praxis, “reflection and action upon the world in order to change it” (36). I have also found that current students in theatre programs across the country have similar goals for their artistic practices. In 2004, responding to my New York University (NYU) students’ desires to make work that...