Hip-Hop Homeplace

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

Abstract

Objective:

bell hooks (1990) described homeplace as a space for love, belonging and connection that actively resists the dominant narratives within white supremacy. This paper highlights how Hip Hop culture and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) can be used as a homeplace in schools, a space where students can speak on their experiences with issues in schools in a way they value most.

Framework, Data, and Methodology:

More recent school counseling research suggests youth participatory action research (YPAR) as a viable approach to group work to both aid youth in processing life experiences, while also challenging the larger systemic determinants (Cook & Krueger-Henney, 2017). YPAR is a group counseling process where youth traverse 1) identifying a salient issue impacting their lives, 2) researching their identified issue, 3) discussing and sorting through findings, 4) creating a product about their issue, and 5) disseminating their project (Cook & Krueger-Henney, 2017). Notable within YPAR and creative approaches to group work are the use of Hip Hop-based strategies (Levy, 2021). Broadly, the use of lyric writing, recording, and performing to process and share emotional experiences in a group process has been found helpful in reducing stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms among adolescents (Levy & Travis, 2020). Thus, this paper details two ways Hip Hop and YPAR were combined to develop homeplaces.

Substantiated Conclusions:

The first intervention was the creation of a studio space in a school for students to use to create music. Results of the Hip Hop-based ASE intervention offered students opportunities for personal development (increased feelings of joy, and stress tolerance, academic motivation) and systemic changes (access to music and development, teacher and student relationships, peer collaboration, and social connectedness). The second was the development of a podcast episode with students in a juvenile detention center. Salient results from this study offered that the Hip Hop podcasting group supported youth in making sense of their experience being incarcerated. In their song and podcast interviews, a youth named their time incarcerated as a personal struggle that encompassed feelings of isolation, regret, and being trapped.

Scholarly Significance:

Rarely shared within research literature, in conversation with bell hooks, this paper significantly elucidates how youth actively used a song and podcast episode to own their narrative. They created rhymes and interviews that were able to offer advice and share their stories for those that needed it. The author describes the experiences of the students in the Hip Hop and YPAR process, drawing implications for the ongoing advancement of the fields of education and school counseling.

Author

• Ian Levy, Rutgers University