HipHopEd: The Compilation on Hip-Hop Education
Volume 3: Hip-Hop as Resistance and Social and Emotional Learning
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- About the editors
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- Introduction: Hip-hop as Resistance and Social and Emotional Learning (Ian Levy and Edmund Adjapong)
- Part I: Disrupting Education and Social Norms through Hip-Hop
- Chapter One: From Block Parties to Disrupting Social Norms (Edmund Adjapong)
- Chapter Two: Hip-Hop Intellectualism and the Legitimation of Knowledge in Higher Education (Andrea N. Hunt)
- Chapter Three: A Boogie Down Production: Hip Hop as Disruption and Transformation (Andrew Torres)
- Chapter Four: More than Beats, More than Rhymes, More than Life: The Life of Hip-Hop and Its Developing Identity (Napoleon Wells)
- Chapter Five: The Miseducation of Urban Youth: Knowledge of Self in Therapy as Liberation from Racial Trauma (Mariel Buque)
- Part II: Social and Emotional Learning through Hip Hop Education
- Chapter Six: When 16 Ain’t Enough: Moving beyond Emotional Evocation (Ian Levy)
- Chapter Seven: Pass the Mic: The Therapeutic Potential of Hip Hop Education in Dance and Spoken Word (Gemma Connell)
- Chapter Eight: Building Character through Hip Hop (Janine Brown)
- Chapter Nine: Enter The CIPHER: Building SWAG through Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Nate Nevado and Kim Davalos)
- Chapter Ten: From BK to the Dirty South and into the Classroom (Qiana Spellman and Ian Levy)
- Contributors
Hip-hop as Resistance and Social and Emotional Learning
ian levy and edmund adjapong
@IanPLevy and @KingAdjapong
For the third volume of The Compilation on Hip-Hop Education, we continue to highlight the voices, stories, and narratives of educators and scholars who approach their practice and research using a framework anchored in hip-hop culture. Much like prior iterations of this series, this edited volume includes chapters from senior scholars, emerging scholars, and practicing educators. As co-editors, our goal is to continue to support and share scholarship that is rooted in hip-hop culture that provides new practical and strategic insights for scholars, practitioners, students, community members, and policymakers as it relates to processing a bevy of life’s stressors.
This volume of The Compilation on Hip-Hop Education series highlights the use of hip-hop as resistance and social and emotional learning across educational spaces. The chapters in this text are informed by hip-hop theory, practices, and the authors’ lived experiences in order to offer individuals approaches as in the development of social and emotional resources to navigate the world at large. Historically, hip-hop positioned itself as a beacon of hope within environments disproportionately fraught with educational and mental health disparities (Emdin et al., 2016; Levy et al., 2018). At its core, hip-hop culture emerged as a counter-narrative and platform for participants to speak back against systemic inequities (Chang, 2005). Scholars have expressed that the beauty of hip-hop is that it “embraces those who have also been excluded from the norm” (Emdin, 2010, p. 6).
However, as hip-hop has grown in prominence and popularity, it is in a constant fight to circumvent cooption and to protect its roots (Rose, 2008). Commercialized ←1 | 2→hip-hop music, videos, and dances have fed negative stereotypes about the Black and Brown community (Reyna et al., 2009; Yousman, 2003). Scholars have critiqued mainstream media for deliberately portraying a stereotypical perception of hip-hop culture, and thereby supporting the public in adopting an understanding of hip-hop that is removed from its cultural origins (Graham, 2017). In fact, there is substantial fear that this portrayal threatens the erasure of hip-hop’s cultural complexities (Thompson, 2016). Given the framing of hip-hop culture as youth culture (Adjapong & Emdin, 2015), we can also be fearful of the erasure of youth’s inherent complexities.
Resisting the impact of society on one’s personal identity development is at the core of what it means to engage in and with hip-hop culture (Wang, 2012). Hip-hop culture promotes authenticity as resistance by providing its participants with the skills to create new platforms for individuals to showcase their complexities and work through difficult thoughts and feelings (McLeod, 1999; Travis et al., 2019). For example, when schools deploy approaches to pedagogy and counseling that are devoid of youth culture, students who appear to be disengaged in traditional classrooms can be found engaging in lunchroom cyphers where they present emotionally laden rhymes that simultaneously allow them to showcase their brilliance and heal (Emdin et al., 2016; Levy et al., 2018). While a particular school system might label this type of practice as unintellectual or disruptive (Alim, 2011), an individual who can see the complexities of hip-hop culture understands that youth are creating opportunities to learn and heal while resisting educational and pedagogical systems that feel inauthentic.
The erasure of a group’s history and cultural origins through the use of colonial practices has been explored extensively by scholars. Smith (2012) describes how educational practices deployed by Western Europeans threatened the very existence of indigenous people’s values, beliefs, voice, and knowledge. Through the promotion of an ideology that indigenous youth lacked intellect, education became the vehicle through which “imperialism and colonialism brought complete disorder to colonized peoples, disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their social relations and their own ways of thinking, feelings and interacting with the world” (p. 29). Within contemporary educational systems, Emdin (2016) argues the these same practices are done onto Black and Brown youth today, and presents the term neoindigenous to allow individuals to “understand the oppression these youth experience, the spaces they inhabit, and the ways these phenomena affect what happens in social settings like traditional classrooms” (p. 9).
As a solution, or mechanism, to protect the cultural complexities of hip-hop from erasure, Smith (2012) and Emdin (2016) agree that youth need to be able to tell their own stories, in their own ways, for their own purposes. Within educational spaces, Maxine Greene (2007) further explained that “there has always been ←2 | 3→a tension between those who depend upon some invisible authority for answers and sanctions and those who have learned to exist in uncertainty, with notions of unrealized possibility rather than the comforts of assurance and predictability” (p. 1). Hip-hop culture is presented as an ideal mechanism to resist cooption, and support the exploration of thoughts and feelings, because it has always stood in direct opposition to invisible authorities and created lanes for a community to collectively navigate uncertainties and discover possibilities. #HipHopEd approaches, therefore, offer educators and students pathways to utilize hip-hop culture to address a variety of barriers that attempt to inhibit social/emotional, academic, and career development. In this text, the authors explore how educators and scholars alike can leverage hip-hop to both disrupt education and asocial norms and support students in social and emotional learning. These two distinct sections offer a robust pathway to both advocate for hip-hop culture to exist authentically within schools, and then to use hip-hop culture to address a bevy of social and emotional outcomes.
references
Adjapong, E. S., & Emdin, C. (2015). Rethinking pedagogy in urban spaces: Implementing hip-hop pedagogy in the urban science classroom. Journal of Urban Learning, Teaching, and Research, 11, 66–77.
Adjapong, E. S., & Levy, I. (Eds.). (2020). HipHopEd: The Compilation on Hip-hop Education: Volume 2: Hip-hop as Praxis and Social Justice. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.
Alim, H. S. (2011). Global ill-literacies: Hip hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of literacy. Review of Research in Education, 35(1), 120–146.
Chang, J. (2005). Can’t stop won’t stop: A history of the hip-hop generation. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.
Emdin, C. (2010). Affiliation and alienation: Hip-hop, rap, and urban science education. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 42, 1–25. doi:10.1080/00220270903161118
Emdin, C. (2016). For White folks who teach in the hood…and the rest of y’all too: Reality pedagogy and urban education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Emdin, C., & Adjapong, E. S. (Eds.). (2018). #HipHopEd: The Compilation on Hip-hop Education: Volume 1: Hip-hop as Education, Philosophy, and Practice. New York, NY: BRILL.
Emdin, C., Adjapong, E., & Levy, I. (2016). Hip-hop based interventions as pedagogy/therapy in STEM: A model from urban science education. Journal for Multicultural Education, 10(3), 307–321.
Graham, N. J. (2017). Southern rap and the rhetoric of region. Phylon, 54(2), 41–57. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/90018661
Details
- Pages
- VIII, 132
- Publication Year
- 2021
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781433183416
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781433183423
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781433183430
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781433181610
- DOI
- 10.3726/b17487
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2021 (September)
- Published
- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2021. VIII, 132 pp.