Building with Hip-Hop Pioneers and the Hip-Education Center to create a working Hip-Hop framework for research, educational 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 next panelist is a mother, filmmaker, archivist, scholar, social entrepreneur, founding director of a Hip-Hop education nonprofit, and a Hip-Hop pioneer from Patterson, NJ. She has worked closely with pioneers of Hip-Hop and countless Hip-Hop practitioners and scholars from DJ Kool Herc, Tupac Shakur, and MC Lyte, to Nas, Eve, and Immortal Technique. In her early years she worked for Yo! MTV Raps and established the first international Hip-Hop film festival and a number of Hip-Hop education conferences. She was an associate producer ofTime is Illmatic, among other films, and has travelled the world tirelessly advocating to advance Hip-Hop culture and educational initiatives. Armed with two master’s degrees and decades of experience and connections, her current work focuses on uniting all of her academic, cultural, and experiential knowledge, to further professionalize the field of Hip-Hop education with compassion, critical reflection, and a commitment to social justice, and global citizenship.

To enter into the discussion at AERA, she will discuss the centrality of Hip-Hop culture in all of the work that she has done nationally and internationally since Hip-Hop’s inception in the interest of adding to a discussion about creating a working Hip-Hop framework for research, educational practice, and assessment. To that end, she will anchor her contribution by discussing a Hip-Hop Education center that she founded in 2010 that aims to be a catalyst for social equity and change through educational and career opportunities by propagating the Hip-Hop education field and the development of a centralized social network and archival management system. The Center is a unique platform where educators, teaching artists, scholars, social workers, and students can share research and resources, publish and distribute educational material, and archive and preserve Hip-Hop and their own history.

The Center aims to generate academic research and evaluation reports to support initiatives around the use of Hip-Hop as an effective educational tool. The Center has published field reports, presented successful Hip-Hop-based education models at teaching and learning conferences, and convened season practitioners to identify powerful practices, develop standards, and assess the needs of the field. The Center also produces and curates international Hip-Hop conferences, film screenings, workshops, think tanks, and hackathons to unite and inform the community.

Since its inception, the Center has been cultivating like-minded problem solvers, education innovators and social entrepreneurs to develop the next generation of leaders and Hip-Hop education ideas. Through the Fellows Program and micro-grants the Center has supported over a dozen projects and initiatives.

To ensure the work is preserved for future generations, the Center’s archiving initiative serves as a community repository to store archives and collections for artists, organizations, schools, and independent collectors. The goal is to facilitate and instill the principles of equal opportunity, inclusion to reduce dropout rates, incarceration, homelessness, unemployment, and violence.

The Center also works closely with politicians, grassroots organization and collectives, parents, educators, and students internationally to integrate Hip-Hop culture as an interdisciplinary, culturally relevant and responsive teaching subject and tool.

Author

• Martha Diaz, Hip-Hop Education Center