Making in Afrocentric Learning Ecologies

• In Event: Cultural Making: Practices, Priorities, and Perspectives

Abstract

Purposes: In this paper, we describe a hip hop-computational making summer camp for middle school aged youth rooted in African American and Afrocentric cultural artistic practices with a focus on hip hop. We describe how hip hop values of remixing, performance, identity building, and taking and making space are related to histories of learning and cultural practice across the Black Atlantic (Christopher, 2018; Gaskins, 2021; Hot 97, 2016).

Perspectives: To understand learning, we take a cultural approach. That is, learning is a cultural activity (Nasir et al., 2006). As such, we describe the summer camp learning setting as a cultural ecology that is “constituted from the historically situated practices, artifacts, relationships, ideas, rules and spatial arrangements that people engage with in…social arrangements” (Authors, 2020).

Methods: We used design research and interpretive analytic methodologies to design the summer activities and understand the learning and identity building taking place. Data were analyzed through constant comparative methods to identify themes. Data-rich episodes representing those themes were then analyzed through interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995).

Data sources: Data sources include observations, fieldnotes, video and audio recordings of activities during the two summer camps (50 total hours) and interviews and focus groups with staff and youth participants. One summer camp was in person and was four weeks in duration. The second summer camp was hybrid in person and virtual and was two weeks in duration. About 40 participants aged 6 to 16, almost all of whom identified as Black or African American, participated in at least one of the camps. Camps were led by an intergenerational instructional team that included older adults, younger adults, and older teens.

Results: Hip hop has a long history of making, and making-do, including hacking into electrical power sources, playing two identical records to extend the best part for dancing, creating the “cue” feature that lets the DJ listen to a song on headphones before it goes through the amplifier, inventing the slipmat used for manipulating records with more ease, building on dances from across the Black Atlantic to create breakdancing, using different materials like linoleum to facilitate those dances, modifying spray can caps to create different effects, and on and on.

Our camp was created for middle school youth to explore the intersections of hip hop, making, STEM, and computing. In the camp, students created multiple interactive designs. These included dances that included both virtual avatars and real world dancers, songs about topics of their choice, rap freestyle randomizers that give instructions to rappers on what words or actions to include in their freestyles as they are performing, DJ battle stations in which participants can create their own sound effects and beats in head-to-head battles, and building a drum machine/sampler.

Scholarly significance: In our panel presentation, we share how youth engagement in making through hip hop was supported by an intergenerational afrocentric cultural ecology of spatial, material, intellectual, and person to person relationships.

Authors

• Dionne N. Champion, University of Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eli Tucker-Raymond, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Christopher Wright, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Brian E. Gravel, Tufts University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Amon D. Millner, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ayana Allen-Handy, Drexel University
  Non-Presenting Author