Exploring and Understanding the Practices, Behaviors, and Identities of Hip-hop Based Educators in Urban Public High School English/Language Arts Classrooms

Abstract

Grounded in theories of culturally relevant and hip-hop pedagogies, this ethnographic study of a demographically diverse "community nominated" cohort of urban public high school teachers who integrate hip-hop pedagogies into their English/language arts classrooms responds to the methodological and theoretical shortcomings of a burgeoning body of research known as "hip-hop based education" (HHBE). HHBE has argued that curriculum and pedagogy derived from hip-hop culture can be used to transmit disciplinary knowledge, improve student motivation, teach critical media literacy, and foster critical consciousness among urban students in traditional and non-traditional K-12 learning environments. However, the field's overreliance on firsthand accounts of teacher-researchers, the vast majority of whom position themselves as members of the "hip-hop generation," discounts the degrees to which teachers' cultural identity informs hip-hop based curricular interventions, pedagogical strategies, and minority students' academic and socio-cultural outcomes. I argue that the hip-hop pedagogies evidenced by non-researching "hip-hop based educators" were diverse and reflected different beliefs about hip-hop, pedagogy, and the politics of education. Three primary findings emerge from 280 hours of classroom participant-observations and ethnographic interviews (January-June 2010): (1) teachers psychologically and discursively construct and perform individual hip-hop cultural identities through "necessary and impossible" politics of difference, (2) teachers' respective curricular approaches to hip-hop as literary texts are closely linked to their respective hip-hop cultural identities, and (3) hip-hop pedagogues employed hip-hop methodologies and literacies that reoriented conceptions of self and other, teacher-student relations, and notions of knowledge around "pedagogies of hip-hop." Study findings are salient to the fields of hip-hop studies, critical multicultural teacher education, and English/language arts education as they provide robust portraits of the instructional and relational nuances, as well as cultural-political implications of HHBE for a largely White, middle-class prospective teacher workforce and an increasingly diverse hip-hop nation.