Extract

After decades of research that delicately pushed the boundaries of our shared understandings on the implications of race, culture and ethnicity on teaching and learning, the time has come for educators to face these issues head on and challenge the ways that schools, and those that work within them, have become complicit in the erasure of the culture of young people from teaching and learning. For decades, scholars have discussed race and culture without naming the ways that it has impacted curriculum, school culture, classroom structure, teacher recruitment, and most importantly, pedagogy.

Today, a new crop of scholars has taken on the charge to push unapologetically and challenge the ways that we shift both our understandings and our practice. Many of these scholars come from within the #HipHopEd community; a coalition of scholar-activists who emerge from the Hip Hop generation with a primary goal of bringing voice to marginalized groups they are in many ways still part of, while shifting theory and practice to reflect how race, class, culture and education intersect. This work has brought many #HipHopEd(ucators) to focus on the challenges of teachers who do not share the same ethnic, racial and cultural backgrounds as their students. We push back against the hyper-focus on theory at the expense of practical, tangible and sensible approaches to teaching and learning and do so without failing to ← ix | x → engage with existent theory while reimagining who and what we pull from in order to develop new...