Toward an Afro-Asian Hip-Hop Pedagogy (original) (raw)

What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy? A loving critique forward

HARVARD EDUCATIONAL REVIEW, 2014

In this article, Django Paris and H. Samy Alim use the emergence of Paris's concept of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) as the foundation for a respectful and productive critique of previous formulations of asset pedagogies. Paying particular attention to asset pedagogy's failures to remain dynamic and critical in a constantly evolving global world, they offer a vision that builds on the crucial work of the past toward a CSP that keeps pace with the changing lives and practices of youth of color. The authors argue that CSP seeks to perpetuate and foster linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling and as a needed response to demographic and social change. Building from their critique, Paris and Alim suggest that CSP's two most important tenets are a focus on the plural and evolving nature of youth identity and cultural practices and a commitment to embracing youth culture's counterhegemonic potential while maintaining a clear-eyed critique of the ways in which youth culture can also reproduce systemic inequalities.

Critical Hip-Hop and Multicultural Education

Our challenge as critical multicultural educators is to theorize and implement innovative strategies to help students at all levels to learn about race and racism. In this article, I will argue that multicultural educators can draw upon student interest in and exposure to hip-hop culture to engender critical conversations about race and racism as well as transformative actions for racial justice. In my earlier original work, I argued that hip-hop music and culture could be used to foster academic and critical literacies among urban youth of color (Morrell and Duncan-Andrade, 2002; Morrell, 2004). I drew from Gloria Ladson-Billings’ (1994) conception of culturally relevant pedagogy to argue that hip-hop culture, as THE popular cultural expression of our time, presented a logical foundation of a pedagogy that resonated with the everyday experiences of many, if not most students attending inner city schools.

The Emerging Critical Pedagogies of Dance Educators in an Urban STEAM After-School Program for Black Girls

Journal of Urban Learning, Teaching, and Research, 2021

The preparation of urban educators has gained widespread attention across education policy, research, and practice. As US urban cities have become more diverse, the teacher workforce has not kept up, and the racial/ethnic demographics of students and teachers are disproportionately incongruent. In order to eradicate an education landscape that perpetuates white, middle-class ways of knowing and being, often at the expense of the cultural practices and cultural wealth of historically marginalized students of color, urban teacher education must be centered toward justice and rooted in critical pedagogies. The literature, albeit bleak, reveals that these perspectives must also be applied to urban dance education. Dance education programs have been significantly eliminated from urban schools over time, and although dance has historical roots in African and African diasporic cultures, dance education continues to be Eurocentric. This phenomenological case study examines the emerging crit...

The Snare of Systemic Racism and Other Challenges Confronting Hip-Hop-Based Pedagogy

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2018

Background Although there has been a pronounced growth in hip-hop-based pedagogy (HHBP) scholarship in recent years, there has not been a concomitant critique of this growing body of work. As a consequence, much of this scholarship is best characterized as advocacy of HHBP. Purpose/Objective The objective of this article is to promote critical discourse around the conceptualization and implementation of HHBP by (a) identifying a set of challenges presented in the conceptualization of HHBP scholarship, (b) describing the narrative that these challenges converge to support, and (c) suggesting an alternative narrative aimed at fostering a more empowering use of HHBP. Research Design To accomplish this objective, we provide an in-depth critique of Emdin and Lee's (2012) article, “Hip-hop, the ‘Obama effect,’ and urban science education.” Through this critique, we first identify eight challenges posed by the authors’ argument, as well as the narrative that is the foundation of this a...

Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

American Educational Research Journal, 1995

In the midst of discussions about improving education, teacher education, equity, and diversity, little has been done to make pedagogy a central area of investigation. This article attempts to challenge notions about the intersection of culture and teaching that rely solely on microanalytic or macroanalytic perspectives. Rather, the article attempts to build on the work done in both of these areas and proposes a culturally relevant theory of education. By raising questions about the location of the researcher in pedagogical research, the article attempts to explicate the theoretical framework of the author in the nexus of collaborative and reflexive research. The pedagogical practices of eight exemplary teachers of African-American students serve as the investigative “site.” Their practices and reflections on those practices provide a way to define and recognize culturally relevant pedagogy.

An Embodiment of a Practice: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

This study explores how four teacher educators - an African American lesbian, a Deaf White man, a multilingual Muslim woman, and a White woman – created culturally sustaining pedagogy by co-teaching an undergraduate education course intentionally focused on embodied representations of diversity and practice, and engaged in collective teaching dialogues with predominantly White pre-service women. In doing so, this study contributes to the conception of culturally sustaining instruction as not only an ideological representation, but also as an embodiment of practice in teacher education programs centered on social justice.

For White Folks Who Teach Hip-Hop—and the Rest of Ya’ll, Too: Interrogating the Positionality of Hip-Hop Educators and Researchers

Equity & Excellence in Education, 2023

Historically, across U.S. education systems, traditional teaching strategies and school curricular practices have been anchored in Western views and Eurocentric frameworks that position whiteness as the center of legitimate knowledge and, as a result, other knowledge as peripheral and insignificant. In this article, we offer practical considerations for educators and researchers who seek to disrupt systems of oppression through the implementation of hip-hop based education. As an extension of culturally relevant pedagogy, we contend that the critical implementation of hip-hop based education must include an interrogation of educator and researcher positionality as it relates to hip-hop culture.