Hip Hop Pedagogy Research Articles

Hamilton meets hip-hop pedagogy

Abstract The fact that Hamilton’s music expresses history largely through hip-hop verse only scratches the surface of its potential impact to change the lives and perspectives of today’s students. Teachers all over the country have engaged in interdisciplinary, meaningful, personal and curriculum-based work based on Hamilton. More than just a source of highly entertaining rap songs about American history, Hamilton provides powerful opportunities to apply the practices and philosophies of the flourishing field of hip-hop pedagogy. This article explores compelling possible links between Hamilton and hip-hop pedagogy. A brief overview of hip-hop culture and the development of hip-hop pedagogy, including roots, values and aims, provides background for three standards-based activities for high school students.

From Rhymes to Resistance: Hip-Hop as a Critical Lens in Promoting Socially Just Teaching

If an educator is to take a critical stance, teach students to do the same, and design lessons that engage students in thoughtful discussions and actions surrounding issues of social justice, then discussions of politics, race, culture, economics and systems of power are crucial to this work, and, the use of hip-hop is a worthwhile endeavour. In this article, three educators from very diverse backgrounds who have experiences at elementary and college levels, consider the ways in which hip-hop music and culture speaks to the lived experiences of students and has the potential to lend a voice to the seemingly voiceless while also meeting the demands imposed by mandated standards. Within the framework of critical pedagogy/critical consciousness, we discuss hip-hop pedagogy as a channel for capitalising on students’ lived experiences.

Bridging Theory and Practice in the Urban Science Classroom: A Framework for Hip-Hop Pedagogy in STEM

This paper explores the state of urban science education as it relates to achievement and engagement of urban youth in STEM and provides insight on improving the experiences of urban youth in the science classroom through the lens of an urban science educator. It provides a framework for Hip-Hop Pedagogy in STEM as an innovative approach to teaching and learning, which anchors the culture, realities and lived experiences of urban youth in pedagogy. Finally, this paper provides educators with practical tools and approaches, which were formed from theory and research that transcend the traditional monolithic approach to teaching science and allows educators to learn and incorporate the culture of urban youth within their pedagogy.

A dialogue on hip-hop, social justice and pedagogy

The authors utilise the format of a dialogue in this essay to explore the place of hip-hop in the United States College classroom. Dialogue fosters a spirit of collaboration that generates more reflective responses and can spark new ideas that would be difficult to think of individually. Previous scholarship has also argued that hip-hop is itself inherently dialogic in that it constantly converses with the world at large. Thus, through dialogue, the authors debate pedagogy as it intersects with hip-hop culture. First, they discuss specific strategies for integrating hip-hop into the classroom, using examples from a range of previously taught classes. Second, they discuss some of the challenges they have faced in teaching with and about hip-hop, particularly as it pertains to the social locations of teachers and students. Finally, they explore whether hip-hop pedagogies are inherently critical, liberatory, or radical.

Forum: Deeper than Rap: Expanding Conceptions of Hip-hop Culture and Pedagogy in the English Language Arts Classroom

Since the early 1990s, language and literacy scholars have explored the pedagogical potential of hip-hop culture in the English language arts classroom. Despite more than 25 years’ worth of peer-reviewed research documenting its effectiveness, hip-hop pedagogies continue to be relegated to the margins of English education policy and practice. In this essay, I argue that the future of “hip-hop based education” (HHBE) research in English education demands moving beyond making a case for hip-hop’s pedagogical merits and toward helping teachers and teacher educators put theories of HHBE into practice, given their various identities and institutional contexts. Thus, I begin by addressing practical and philosophical dilemmas regarding the role, purpose, and function of hip-hop-based curricular interventions in this current era of the Common Core State Standards. As the title of this Forum piece suggests, hip-hop culture and pedagogy are more than just rap music and textual analysis. Therefore, I seek to shift the conversation from pedagogies with hip-hop texts to a more complex unit of analysis known as “pedagogies with hip-hop aesthetics.” With a broader and deeper understanding of hip-hop cultural knowledge, as well as the tensions and contradictions contributing to the shortcomings of HHBE research, I conclude with a call for additional studies that “show and prove” the possibilities (and pitfalls) of hip-hop pedagogies in English language arts and English education classrooms.

We Got Next: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Next Generation of Democratic Education

Centering the classroom on the study of hip-hop culture creates meaningful opportunities for students to engage in socio-political consciousness, community engagement, and academic skill building.

On innervisions and becoming in urban education: Pentecostal hip-hop pedagogies in the key of life

In the foreword to my book Urban Science Education for the Hip-hop Generation, Maxine Greene concisely and powerfully describes her stance on teaching and learning. She defines education as “an exp...

“Welcome to The Shop”

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe the ways in which hip-hop pedagogies and literacies encouraged middle school students to explore performance poetry as a tool to “(w)right” the truth(s) about learning and living in their local and global communities. Design/methodology/approach Collaborative self-study research methodologies were used by the author, a black male teacher educator and hip-hop cultural insider, along with two white, female reading specialists and hip-hop cultural outsiders, to collect and analyze the practices and behaviors used in The Shop – an after-school hip-hop-based spoken word poetry club for middle school students in a small, urban public school district in Northeastern USA. Findings Three primary findings emerge: teachers with limited cultural and content knowledge of hip-hop may struggle to negotiate real and perceived curricular constraints associated with using pedagogies with hip-hop texts and aesthetics in traditional school contexts, the intersections of teachers’ racial, cultural and gender identities informed the respective practices and behaviors in a number of interesting ways, and using hip-hop pedagogies for social justice in public schools requires a delicate balance of both transparency and discretion on the part of teachers. Originality/value Study findings are salient for in- and pre-service English teachers and English educators, as they offer insights and reflections on the instructional and relational challenges cultural outsiders may face when using hip-hop culture to create spaces and opportunities for young people to talk back and speak truth to power.

Hybrids

Hybrids

Disrupting neoliberalism and bridging the multiple worlds of marginalized youth via Hip-Hop pedagogy: Contemplating possibilities

As a cultural phenomenon, Hip-Hop is a complex and contested terrain. Historically rooted in Black and Latino youth subcultures of New York City, Hip-Hop emerged as a form of sociocultural expressi...

Complex Personhood of Hip Hop & the Sensibilities of the Culture that Fosters Knowledge of Self & Self-Determination

ABSTRACTHip hop music and culture have a complex identity in that hip hop is based in self-determination, resistance, and the long enduring fight for Black freedom, but was also created alongside the seductiveness of the material and psychological conditions of capitalism, sexism, and patriarchy. Hip hop pedagogy (HHP) as a pedagogical framework is birthed out of that intricate balance in hip hop. Given those basic contradictions, I explore the complex personhood of hip hop and its relationship to HHP, which generates humanizing, critical, and creative pedagogical (re)interventions and sensibilities that foster self-determination, self-knowledge, and acts of resistance with young people. I do this by examining hip hop educational spaces that nurture the ways of doing and knowing youth who are deeply informed by hip hop.

Cultural interventions: Repositioning hip hop education in India

In this article we show how subject positions are assumed when hip hop is used by institutions supported by western nation-states as a ‘cultural intervention’ in the global south. Focusing on the Indo-German Hip Hop & Urban Art Project 2011–2012, a hip hop educational project sited in several cities in India and sponsored by cultural institutions funded by the German State, we study how actors negotiate between what we identify as a discourse of hip hop authenticity and a discourse of internationalization. Employing a theory of scales allows us to investigate how actors on the ground engage in the semiotic play of repositioning of and in historically situated notions of authenticity and pedagogy. We argue that the findings have implications for future applied and theoretical work on the internationalization of hip hop as an educational and diplomatic endeavor.

L2 Learners Find the South Bronx: Hip-Hop, Globalization, and Identity Construction

In Pennycook's, Global Englishes, Rip Slyme, and Permativity, he argues for a critical stance on the globalization process, looking beyond the notion that standard forms of English are only tied to certain limiting domains. English is actually transforming its identity through the globalization process, constructing languages in various ways within local communities. However, the varieties of English that are being transplanted through globalization are not acting simply as hegemonic languages, or seamlessly entering into a culture's Identity. Local identities are being transformed, raising questions regarding community and language influence. An exploration of the globalization process in relation to language needs to take place in order to discover English's affect on individual's identity, specifically second language learners. How are globalized Englishes influencing second language learners and what are the implications? My paper explores this question by examining Hip-hop culture as a vehicle for the English language, focusing on Hip-Hop pedagogy and its relation to second language acquisition. Hip-hop has helped give rise to the notion of glocalization: engaging the intersections of global and local dynamics that reframe cultural forms through local appropriations of a globally acceptable cultural model which then transform into a new social context. This new social context engages language-learning contexts, generating new languages that are outside of the local community. By reviewing Pennycook's notion of Performativity and Ibrahhim's argument on Hip-Hop as a platform for positive identity formation, my manuscript explores the relationship L2 learners have with Hip-Hop within a local community and its pedagogical implications.

Rapping in Catalan in class and the empowerment of the learner

ABSTRACTDespite the well-known educational possibilities afforded by Rhythm And Poetry (RAP) for the development of musical, lyrical and critical skills [Morrell, E., & Duncan-Andrade, J. M. R. (2002). Promoting Academic Literacy with Urban Youth through Engaging Hip-hop Culture. The English Journal, 91(6), 88–92. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/821822; Hill, M. L. (2009). Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity. New York, NY: Teachers College Press; Low, B. E. (2011). Slam School: Learning Through Conflict in the Hip-Hop and Spoken Word Classroom. Chicago, IL: Stanford University Press], it remains a lyrical genre often excluded from Catalan secondary education. This paper focuses on a four-day series of rap workshops given in 2012 by a famous local Catalan rap artist in a multicultural and multilingual state school in Catalonia. It analyses the impact that the workshops had, above all in terms of classroom engagement, linguistic empowerment and textual ‘agency’ [Moje, E. B., & Lewis, C. (2007). Examining Opportunities to Learn Literacy: The role of critical sociocultural literacy research. In E. B. Moje, C. Lewis, & P. Enciso (Eds.), Reframing sociocultural research on literacy: identity, agency and power (pp. 15–48). Mahwah, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum], on a range of students with varying degrees of command of the Catalan language and with different degrees of experience with rap music. Through the classroom activity described herein, we show the pedagogical opportunities that rap music offers as a hybrid text in-between oral and written codes that makes it a powerful vehicle for self-expression, whilst enabling the acknowledgement of real uses of languages and genres related to the cultural practices of urban students, in the classroom. In particular, we argue that bridging Catalan rap culture to the goals of the school curriculum, especially in highly multilingual and multicultural school contexts, helps to promote the socialisation of the Catalan language in and beyond the school.

Hip Hop as Pedagogy: Something from Something

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...

Hip-hop – what's in it for the academy? Self-understanding, pedagogy and aesthetical learning processes in everyday cultural Praxis

Since hip-hop first appeared in New York over 35 years ago, it has been associated with social activism and education. Accordingly, it is not surprising that academic institutions in universities and K-12 schools are interested in hip-hop. In this article, we will highlight the ‘hip-hop academisation’ and map out a new direction in a dialog between hip-hop and the academic world. By investigating the relation between hip-hop and pedagogy through interviews with prominent members of the hip-hop community in New York City as well as an analysis of ‘universal’, collective, and aesthetic learning processes in a local, Swedish youth-based hip-hop collective, we intend to open up a theoretical discourse on hip-hop and emancipatory pedagogy. Our empirical data are collected through ethnographical methods.

The Message: Using Hip-Hop Pedagogy as a Literacy Building Tool for Grade 8

The Message: Using Hip-Hop Pedagogy as a Literacy Building Tool for Grade 8

Back to the Lab With Hip Hop Education

Back to the Lab With Hip Hop Education

Starting With Style

One fundamental breakthrough in the field of hip-hop education in recent years is the shift from understanding hip-hop solely as content to understanding hip-hop also as aesthetic form. In this article, I chart the roots of this shift across disciplines and focus on what it might mean for the future of hip-hop education, pedagogy, and research in context with urban education. I outline how this thread might become the sine qua non of an emerging second wave of hip-hop education research and practice derived primarily from aesthetic forms rather than an amalgamation of culturally relevant and critical approaches.

Toward hip-hop pedagogies for music education

Music education scholarship in the areas of popular, vernacular, and participatory musicianship has grown in the past decades; however, music education research concerned specifically with hip-hop has been relatively scarce. Because hip-hop music can differ tremendously from the traditional western genres with which many music educators are most familiar, a great need for research in this area exists. In this article, I summarize general education scholarship related to hip-hop and offer implications toward hip-hop pedagogies for music education. I employ Hill’s (2009) classifications of hip-hop pedagogy ( Pedagogies with hip-hop, Pedagogies about hip-hop, and Pedagogies of hip-hop) as a structure to better understand previous literature and to provide a descriptive framework for potential applications of hip-hop pedagogies to music education settings. I describe Hill’s categories using the labels of Hip-hop as a bridge, Hip-hop as a lens, and Hip-hop as practice.