Exploring Youth-Developed Frameworks for Teaching and Learning Through Hip-Hop Culture and Community

• In Event: Still Nuthing Ta F’ Wit: Examining the Power of Hip-Hop to Advance Justice for Youth

Abstract

Objective:

Acting upon the notion that “schooling is always implicated in the remaking of the world” (Penuel & O’Connor, 2018, p. 9), this study examines the intersections between pedagogy, youth culture, Hip Hop, and activism in order to learn not only how young people envision their social and educational futures, but also how they enact these ideas through the development of a youth-designed teaching and learning community. Conceptualizing Hip Hop culture as both a community of practice and a collective third space (Gutiérrez, Rymes, & Larson, 1995), this research examines how participants in a youth-led educational community develop and enact visions of their social futures (Penuel & O’Connor 2018) by engaging in the design of an annual youth-led Hip Hop conference.

Framework, Data, and Methodology:

In examining young people’s co-construction of a social justice education curriculum and community, this study takes up Lave and Wenger’s (1991) concept of a “learning curriculum”; one that is fluid and co-constructed through community participation, to explore the intersection of young people’s educational experiences, their engagement with Hip Hop culture, and their speculative civic literacies. Drawing from design-based methodologies as well as youth voice scholarship, this research project analyzes video and audio-recording of virtual leadership meetings with the youth participants, individual and focus group interviews with the youth leaders, researcher memos, online proposals submitted to the conference, and the results of a post-conference survey.

Substantiated Conclusions:

In their process of reviewing workshop proposals for the annual conference, the youth leaders constructed a pedagogical framework that became the foundation of the structure and ethos of the conference community. This framework was equally attentive to the leaders’ goals of social transformation and adherence to the values of Hip Hop culture, including collectivity, inclusivity, and social action. The youth leaders’ collective work resulted in their building of a community in which participants' potential for teaching, learning, and leadership was both recognized and developed. This community is grounded in youth culture and activism and tied to the youth leaders’ previous experiences along with their radical imaginings of what is possible with and through education.

Scholarly Significance:

The pedagogies that these youth developed include their framing of teaching as a learning process in which expertise is co-constructed and fluid; the idea that teaching must do something other than share information; a “collective approach” to pedagogy in which participants are teaching and learning from and with one another and learners’ stories and identities are integrated in the curriculum; and the need to root pedagogy in youth culture and activism. While many of these theories, such as the co-construction of knowledge and learning as a collective practice, align with existing theories of education (e.g. Freire, 1970/2000; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Gutiérrez & Vossoughi, 2010), the youth leaders’ decision to center Hip Hop, activism, and community-building in their design of a learning community reflects the distinct epistemological lens that youth offer to educational design as well as the role of collective social dreaming in youth radical imagination and future-building.

Author

• Lauren Leigh Kelly, Rutgers University