Black to the Future: Hip-Hop, Applied Learning, and a Song of Liberation

• In Event: The Cypher: Resistance and Liberation in Pedagogical Praxis

Abstract

Hip-hop culture is anchored by a set of modalities that challenge young people to enact their visual, sonic, embodied, and poetic aesthetics for the purpose of producing new knowledge. In schools, this knowledge is often contested, signaling to some students that their ways of being are unwelcome within the context of school. Critical hip-hop pedagogy has reenergized culturally-responsive educators, inspiring new, youth-centered forms of engagement that complicate antiquated narratives of place and space. This paper, written and arranged like a song, explores a digital makerspace through the prism of CHHP & Afrofuturism. Our aim is to establish theoretical and pedagogical foundations which invite scholars and practitioners to (re)consider hip-hop culture as the next frontier of applied and place-based learning.

Authors

• Donovan Albert Livingston, Wake Forest University

• Kevin Joshua Rowsey, Guilford County School System