It's Something You Live: Rethinking Hip-Hop Praxis Through Critical Making Practice

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

Abstract

Objectives
Many maker activities and maker spaces fail to support or engage historically marginalized communities, despite their well-documented potential to promote critical literacy formation, academic skill engagement, and social justice education. This paper chronicles a response to this concern by way of an 8-week, after-school program created to support equitable academic and civic engagement for youth that focused on the creation of original, speculative Hip Hop cultural artifacts (rap, DJ, graffiti, and breakdancing), making practices and communities, and the simultaneous development of critical literacy and social justice perspectives. The series, open to community youth, was located in the makerspace of a local public library.

Theoretical Framework
Within this study, project designers drew from Gutierrez and Rogoff’s (2003) concept of “repertoires of practice” and focused particularly on questions including:
What activities, practices, and epistemologies “count” as making?
Who has agency to make these determinations?
How engagement with hip hop cultural practices (rap, DJ, breaking, and/or graffiti) mediates these understandings and promotes critical civic engagement.

Methods
I consider two instances where students engaged in Hip Hop-centered, speculative practices (particularly beat making and graffiti writing) and analyze these moments of resistance and agency as opportunities to expand understanding(s) of the development of critical media literacy and social justice orientation(s). This paper foregrounds the importance of cultures of origin and speculative design as participants develop artistic, social, and political identities over the course of the workshop. Ultimately, this paper explores implications for classroom learning that emerged from their creations including expression, exploration, and collaboration toward more equitable educational contexts, communities, and environments.

Data
In a series of maker workshops co-constructed, facilitated, and developed with high-school youth, researchers studied the nature and potential of critical constructionist design practice(s) that draw specifically from Hip Hop aesthetics, performances, and communities. Over eight sessions, in collaboration with professional artists, activists, and scholars, participants were invited to imagine futures that center their experiences and priorities by designing and fabricating original pieces of hip hop artifacts.
In this paper I share exemplar hip hop artifacts and excerpts from interviews and observations taken throughout the design process to illustrate how designers proposed alternate visions of literacy, science and technology by constructing speculative hip hop artifacts that highlight their relationship to the environment, their community, and themselves.

Significance
In this paper I take up questions regarding ways Critical Design (Barab, et al., 2004), speculative design (Dunne & Raby, 2003), and hip hop practices -- and praxes more specifically in this case -- might provide a space for young people to openly discuss and challenge the unsettling pressure(s) of what it means to be an learner of color in America? When youth are encouraged to play with their personal past and present, and through a critical making workshop, invited to imagine future technologies, societies, and communities, how might they recreate themselves and their communities? What technologies and techniques can be leveraged to enhance a community’s strengths or to emancipate it from systemic oppression?

Author

• Michael B. Dando, St Cloud State University