"It's Bigger Than Hip-Hop": School Counseling as an Exercise of Counterhegemonic Healing

• In Event: 25.043 - "We Gon' Be Alright": Hip-Hop-Based Education, Knowledge, and Freedom

Abstract

Racial homogeneity and cultural encapsulation evidenced among the teacher workforce has been identified as major contributors to the disengagement Black students experience (Matias, 2013). Schools’ overreliance on draconian, zero-tolerance disciplinary policies when deliberating behavioral refractions committed by Black students is also well established (Morris, 2016). We contend that school counselors should investigate the linkages between hip hop culture and the politics encapsulating the lives of students, while also examining the ways hip hop influences students’ definitions of themselves and others (Day-Vines & Day-Hairston, 2006; Noguera, 2009). It is important to expand our understanding of hip hop beyond youth and their subcultures to include discourses about hip hop can function as a pedagogical site of subversive social commentary, counternarrative, and interrogation.

Authors

• Ahmad Rashad Washington, University of Louisville

• Arash Daneshzadeh, University of San Francisco