The Beauty in the Struggle: How Hip-Hop Pedagogy Informs College Counseling Practices

• In Event: You Know How We Do It: Hip-Hop Pedagogy in the Classroom, Counseling, and Life

Abstract

Navigating through community college creates many challenges for students, specifically those from traditionally marginalized communities. Their experiences can be compounded by issues such as experiences of isolation and the lack of supportive networks (Harper & Hurtado, 2007). Research has shown that retention rates are impacted by student experiences during the early weeks of college (Bailey, 2009). The role of college counseling has been connected to student success outcomes (Bailey & Alfonso, 2005). Thus, the purpose of this study is designed to explore the lives of community college counselors who utilizes Hip Hop pedagogy in their counseling practices. Hip Hop, by nature, is participatory that embodies attention and aesthetics. According to Petchauer (2015), aesthetics is a thread that flows throughout the larger bodies of Hip Hop educational disciplines. Aesthetics is the concept in which counselors and students can discover “ways of doing and being.”
Using portraiture as a research method, I will be able to learn through interviews about counselors’ lived histories in Hip Hop and how Hip Hop have shaped and informed their college counseling practices. It is critical to examine current college counseling approaches beyond the course planning and goal setting. Similar to critical and post-structural perspectives, Hip Hop pedagogy challenges us to examine the role of context, intersectionality, and acknowledgement of individual agency (Jones & Lazarus-Stewart, 2016). Through this study, we hope to add Hip Hop pedagogy to the existing scholarship in college counseling and help inform ways to support traditionally marginalized communities navigate through institutions of higher education.

Author

• Nathaniel Nevado, Skyline College