Hip-Hop as an Organic Form of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy From South Africa to the United States

• In Event: The Dreams, Possibilities, and Necessity of Hip-Hop Pedagogy From the United States to South Africa

Abstract

While Hip Hop Culture’s global spread has been well-documented (at least since
Mitchell’s Global Noise 2001), Hip Hop education’s global impact has not. As youth in rapidly transforming global cities undergo a search for “identity” and “belonging”, youth-serving institutions have tested new frameworks to address the shifting relations between culture, learning, and civic engagement. In this exploration of Hip Hop pedagogy as CSP from Cape Town to the California Bay Area, we are driven by questions asked by Paris and Alim (2014): What would our pedagogies look like if we decentered hegemonic ideas about and expectations of communities of color? What would liberating ourselves from these educational expectations mean for our abilities to envision new forms of teaching and learning? We believe equity and access can be achieved by centering the heritage and contemporary practices of youth and communities of color—rather than always viewing these rich practices as resources to take students from where they are to some presumably “better” place.

As “culture” becomes more complex in this globalized era, researchers need to work with practitioners on the ground to rethink how to engage youth. This paper explores organic forms of Hip Hop as culturally sustaining pedagogies within a high school and two community-based Hip Hop organizations in the Cape Town and the California Bay Area. We argue that pedagogical theory “coming out of the academy” often takes for granted what youth in disadvantaged communities are already doing—and theorizing—at the nexus of culture, learning, and civic engagement. Yet organizations and institutions such as those featured in our collaboration have, in fact, long been designing pedagogies explicit in their embrace of a pluralist future. We know Hip Hop is both a heritage and contemporary practice for youth that has become globally valued for its promise and potential (Alim & Haupt, in press; Haupt, Jansen, Williams & Alim, forthcoming).

As youth continue to develop new, complex and overlapping forms of racial/ethnic identification in a world where cultural and linguistic recombinations flow in multiple directions, we argue for the need to speak to this new reality, to develop new approaches based in bottom-up, collective explorations of best practices and ideas to create educational opportunities that center our young people and their success. We need loving critiques that courageously center and reflexively consider the value and survivance of youth. Data for this paper is based on over 700 hours of ethnographic data with Hip Hop artists and educators in Cape Town and the California Bay Area, with new data collected from January through March 2017. During data collection scholars and artists from the California Bay Area engaged in cultural and pedagogical exchanges with those from South Africa.

Authors

• H. Samy Alim, University of California - Los Angeles

• Adam Haupt, University of Cape Town