“There’s Levels to This Shit!” Contributions, Additive, Transformative, and Social Action Approaches to Hip-Hop Content Integration

• In Event: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and Teacher Education for the Next 50 Years: Interrogating the Tensions in the Arcs and Trajectories of Hip-Hop

Abstract

The first scholarship on Hip Hop’s purpose and function in schools was published more than thirty years ago. Since then, Hip Hop-Based Education scholars have wrestled with how to better prepare K–12 educators to deliver culturally relevant and sustaining Hip Hop-based curriculum and instruction within structures that have not had the academic, cultural, and sociopolitical interests of minoritized youth at heart. Building on Banks’s theoretical framework for multicultural content integration (Banks, 2020), the author draws on nearly twenty years of experience researching and teaching in a variety of capacities and contexts to put forth a conceptual model of Hip Hop content integration. In addition to providing examples of contributions, additive, transformative, and social action approaches to Hip Hop content integration, the author unearths some of the pedagogical dilemmas that emerge at the intersections of teachers’ respective beliefs about teaching and learning, social identities, classroom climates, and other place-based variables.

Author

• H. Bernard Hall, Drexel University