Ontology as Knowledge, Culture as Transmission: Assessing Knowledge of Wellness Praxis Within a Hip-Hop Storytelling Intervention

• In Event: Spit What You Know: Critical Notions of Knowing, Showing, and Educational Assessment Through Hip-Hop

Abstract

Research into wellness outcomes for youth of color shows that minoritized youth face systemic inequities in accessing care and establishing wellness routines. This research, however, often views minoritized youth and their communities from a deficit lens. Deficit models attribute racial and socioeconomic disparities in mental health outcomes to a culture of poverty (Moynihan, 1965) - the notion that minoritized communities lack the cultural proclivities (values, knowledge, and practices) to adequately prioritize and pursue wellness. This leads to the implementation of invalid assessments based around Eurocentric standards of wellness; often failing to measure what youth of color know about mental and socioemotional well being.
The Lyripeutics Storytelling Project (LSP) is a design-based research study built around an asset-based approach to wellness learning, where we construe ontology as knowledge and culture as the transmission of this ontological knowledge. We draw on Spencer’s (1997) PVEST model, which invites researchers aiming for resilient youth outcomes to identify the social, cultural and institutional protective factors that have evolved within the community; adaptive resources that enable trajectories of wellness.
LSP investigates how learning environments, rooted in hip-hop based education and critical literacies (Freire 1990), can facilitate opportunities for Black & Brown youth to learn (and share) narratives of healing that are endogenous to the cultural communities they traverse. In particular we trace how the learning, re-writing, internalizing and revoicing of culturally-rooted wellness narratives (in a hip-hop format) is related to the development of wellness outcomes, for low-income urban students. The intervention focuses on students from cultural communities impacted by historical forms of cultural exclusion (Latinx, Indigenous, AAPI & Black) from the Greater Denver Area.
Within LSP, youth gain expertise in one of the most prominent storytelling genres in contemporary language arts; hip-hop. Instructors introduce the history and conventions of the artform; including spotlight lectures on the 5 elements of hip-hop (knowledge, graffitti, emceeing, djing, and breakdancing). Youth learn the conventions of hip-hop storytelling, and then use those skills to re-write the wellness narratives of their traditions in a genre that is relevant to global youth culture. Research on hip-hop pedagogy (Stovall 2006, Alim 2007, Petchauer 2009) has established how this youth-centered genre acts as an intellectually rich set of practices in which to frame multi-disciplinary learning.
The Spring 2021 intervention took place during the global pandemic as 74 youth completed the storytelling activity, adding their stories to the Lyripeutics Digital Anthology. We utilized multimodal discourse analysis of the artistic projects in this anthology and found that youth participants construed wellness in various culturally endogenous ways including: (1) a reconnection to the soul, (2) representation of their intersecting identities including race and immigration status, (3) the importance to take care of the self (4) art as joy & resistance, (5) the journey of their ancestors, (6) connectedness to community despite gentrification, (7) family recipes used for generations, and (8) cross cultural movements against gendered violence. The poster explores how these themes can be utilized as design principles to assess the knowledge that BIPOC youth have of endogenous wellness practices.

Authors

• Kalonji L. Nzinga, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Marlene Palomar, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Shawn T. O'Neal, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Alexander Williams, University of California - Los Angeles

• Carla Cariño