In order for hip-hop to reach the level of prevalence that it enjoys on today’s educational landscape – at least 150 educators at the K-12 level were using hip-hop in their class in 2011, the last time a hip-hop education “census” took place – it had to overcome the skepticism of critics who questioned its validity in educational spaces. The University of Arizona offers a minor in Hip Hop Studies, and McNally Smith College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, offers a hip-hop diploma, which includes 45 credits and three semesters of hip-hop music production, language and history courses. More than 300 colleges and universities have offered courses on hip-hop. Hip-hop academic scholarship goes back at least as far as Tricia Rose’s groundbreaking 1994 book, “ Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.” Since then, numerous hip-hop education books have been written. Hip-hop has made significant inroads into higher education as well. Wikimedia CommonsĬollectively, their research has found that hip-hop can be used to teach critical thinking skills, critical literacy, media literacy skills, STEM skills, critical consciousness and more. For the past decade or two, scholars such as Marc Lamont Hill, Chris Emdin and Jeff Duncan-Andrade have explored the impact and effectiveness of hip-hop in educational settings. Hip-hop in America’s classrooms is not new. But I also stress the need to be authentic – in other words, don’t lie about where you are from – and steer clear of gimmicky hip-hop instructional strategies, such as parroting hip-hop lingo out of context, or showing a random rap video that has nothing to do with the course subject. In my Hip Hop Pedagogy courses, K-12 teachers and college instructors learn how to tap into the richness of hip-hop culture to engage students in topics that range from Shakespeare to neuroscience. And uses it to foster success in the classroom.Īs one who has taught Hip Hop Pedagogy courses to K-12 teachers and instructors in higher ed for the last 10 years, I believe hip-hop has the potential to connect students to important subjects they might otherwise dismiss. It’s a form of teaching that takes the most popular genre of music in the U.S. Who embrace a form of teaching known as Hip Hop Pedagogy. In Pasadena, California, Manuel Rustin, a social studies teacher at John Muir High School, uses rap songs to get students to make meaning of current events and history through a course entitled “ Urban Culture and Society.”Īt Detroit’s Frederick Douglass Academy, Quan Neloms has students search the lyrics of their favorite rap songs for “college-level vocabulary and references to key events and concepts from American history.”Ĭollectively, the three teachers represent part of a new generation of educators
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