Facilitating the creation of 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

Is an islander, meditator, sister, auntie, youth advocate, critical ethnographer, community organizer, and an assistant professor of English Education and acting director of the single subject credential program in English at a Latinx-serving state university in California.

For the last 19 years, she has been privileged to teach, learn, research, and organize with brilliant young scholars, leaders and Hip-Hop artists, from Seattle and the Bay Area to New York City. Whether she is promoting young artists, directing youth education nonprofits, studying, organizing, dancing, writing, speaking internationally, advising political campaigns, lobbying city council members, establishing free Hip-Hop youth programs, or teaching and learning with preservice teachers, Hip-Hop culture is her heartbeat.Her research, teaching, community organizing, and moves in the world are rooted in an ethic of love and are aimed at contributing to a more just and equitable global society through humanizing and innovative pedagogies that cultivate literacies of access and liberation (Johnson, 2016) in culturally and linguistically diverse settings by leveraging digital literacies, critical theory, debate, and participatory action research in teaching and teacher education.

She is humbled to organize, propose, and chair an intergenerational, transdisciplinary, dialogical and ambitious AERA symposium with Hip-Hop artists, young scholars, civic leaders, researchers, social entrepreneurs, and visionaries.

We come from the academy and the streets, from public schools, nonprofits and community organizations. We come from film, the music industry, performing stages, and recording booths. We grow roses in concrete (Shakur, 1999). We cling onto critical hope (Duncan-Andrade, 2009). We are bound by Hip-Hop culture and are committed to pushing educational research, practice, and assessment to carving pathways to freedom. All of our work has always been grounded by the intention to reshape the educational arena and the larger political sphere. But none of our work would be possible, nor would we be who we are, without Hip-Hop.
Toward this ambitious end, some possible questions the group will consider are:

What might a framework look like that encourages researchers, educators, policymakers, and students to both look inwardly and mediate the world of differences in identities, positionalities, power/knowledge, and discern fact from fiction?
How might a framework help guide authentic and purposeful learning, honor diverse linguistic and cultural practices, and help make explicit critiques of power?
How might it provide affirmations, challenges, and opportunities to make mistakes, learn, and grow?
How might a framework offer new ways to measure how our students are growing academically?
How might Hip-Hop culture help researchers take a transcript and think about a wider set of tools to interpret them? What can a Hip-Hop framework see?
How might a Hip-Hop framework serve as a guide for establishing communities of trust and collaboration and enable us to see synergies beyond mere degrees, publications and certificates?
How might a framework insist that our children are capable, brilliant, and want to learn?
How might that framework help us to operate first from an ethic of love and a belief in the excellence of our young scholars and leaders?

Author

• Dr. Jen Johnson, San José State University