Leveraging Holistic Equity and Hip-Hop Culture to Explore Possibilities for Creating a Hip-Hop Framework for Educational Research, Practice, and Assessment

• In Event: Dreaming (A)loud for Liberation: Build With Hip-Hop Pioneers, Practitioners, and Scholars to Design a Hip-Hop Framework for Educational Research, Practice, and Assessment

Abstract

The first panelist is a Grammy® and BET Award nominated Hip-Hop and soul artist from Oakland, California and a Leadership Coordinator for the Hip-Hop Caucus. She released her debut album in 2001 and her follow-up album in 2014. Known for using her artistic platform to promote healing and social justice, she works with and advocates for young people around the globe. Most recently, she travelled with the Schools Not Prisons Tour as both artist and co-moderator for youth roundtables. A graduate of UC Berkeley in Interdisciplinary Studies, her scholarship focuses on using Holistic Equity as a framework to critique and respond to the neoliberal zeitgeist permeating education around the globe, and to design educational policies that addresses the rapid decentralization of public education and inequitable educational opportunities. Expressing how Hip-Hop raised her, she credits Hip-Hop for the scholar and human rights advocate that she has become. As such, she stresses that when we think about Hip-Hop Education, we must not overlook our scholars who are nurtured by Hip-Hop but who may not be considered Hip-Hop education scholars or adhere to what scholars identify as Hip-Hop-based education (Hill, 2009; Love, 2015). Instead, she takes a more expansive view; because of Hip-Hop, she is a different type of scholar, educator, and community organizer: she looks for different types of data; she brings a unique skill set to building with communities domestically and around the globe; and she created her own framework for analyzing educational research. She contends that when we think about Hip-Hop education, we must not overlook how the culture imparts unique ways of knowing, researching, organizing, and teaching within and outside the field of Hip-Hop education. While she doesn’t teach Hip-Hop education in the strict definition of the term, she is a Hip-hop scholar, teacher, and leader.
Her goal in participating in the AERA symposium is to bring all of her experiences, research, and networks to bare in dialoguing with AERA attendees to further the thinking around how we can leverage Hip-Hop culture for liberation and collectively dream out loud to explore what a Hip-Hop framework for educational research might look like.

Author

• Mandolyn Ludlum