Hip-Hop Identity and Curriculum Construction Among Urban Public High School English Teachers

• In Event: Identity and Teachers: Teacher Sense-Making in Context

Abstract

This paper argues that the possibilities for how teachers are able to integrate hip-hop culture into English/language arts curriculum are directly linked to their respective cultural positionalities and beliefs about teaching. Analysis of critical ethnographic data collected as participant-observer of a community nominated cohort of “hip-hop literacy educators” working in small urban public high schools reveals two primary findings: (1) teachers positioned the self and ‘other’ in proximity to hip-hop culture through “necessary and impossible” politics of exclusion, and (2) even though they all considered themselves progressive educators, teachers’ exhibited a range of lower and higher-level hip-hop based curricular approaches to improving Black and Latino/a students’ academic and socio-cultural outcomes.

Author

• H. Bernard Hall, West Chester University of Pennsylvania