Spit (Spin, Draw, Dance) What You Know: Destroying and Rebuilding Literacy Assessment in a Hip-Hop-Based Informal Learning Context

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

Abstract

Objective
This paper draws from the Hip-hop (W)righting Workshop (aka The Shop) — an after-school, hip-hop literacy (Alim, 2011) program for middle school students in a large, urban district in the Mid-Atlantic United States — highlighting an activity called “Spit (Spin, Draw, Dance) What You Know”. The design of a pre/post assessment was guided by:
Activate students’ prior knowledge of in-school and/or out-of-school literacies
Assess the literacy knowledge and skills students following participation
Support students’ use of hip-hop literacies to show what they know about “the word and the world” (Freire & Macedo, 1987).
This paper demonstrates the potential of hip-hop-based (Hill, 2009) “informal learning contexts” (ILC) (Vadeboncoeur, 2006; Garcia & Weiss, 2020) as a response to disparate education outcomes between student groups across racial and class lines.

Theoretical Framework
Alim’s (2011) “hip-hop ILL-literacies,” offers a theoretical framework that reconceptualizes hegemonic notions of language and literacy around the poetics and politics of hip-hop culture. The components of hip-hop ill-literacies form the acronym ILL: intimacy, lived, and liberatory. I describe a hip-hop-based ILC, where, in contrast to traditional schooling contexts driven by assessment and accountability, primacy is placed on cultivating “safe spaces of reciprocity, mutual respect, and the development of meaningful relationships” (Alim, 2011, p. 136). Intimacy is fostered, in part, by reorienting the ELA classroom around students’ “out-of-school” literacies, centering the lived component of ill-literacies by viewing students as “individuals with hopes, fears, anxieties, and complicated lives outside the classroom” (p. 136). This learning activity explores the knowledge(s) and skills students (and teachers) possess that are marginalized in traditional schooling. Further, ill-literacies are liberatory, The Shop “helps students resist and challenge the sociostructural forces” (Alim, 2011, p. 138) that limit possibilities. In this vein, analysis of local practices in The Shop contributes to discourses on What does it mean to be literate in the 21st Century? and What does effective teaching and student achievement look like in urban K-12 schools?

Methodology
Researching hip-hop-based ELA pedagogical innovations, empowering teachers and students to address social justice issues, and “(w)righting” the dominant discourses about teaching and learning in urban K-12 educational requires taking an “inquiry stance” as a practitioner researcher (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). Ways of knowing, showing, and being in The Shop are captured by video camera glasses worn by students, myself, and pre-service English teachers participating and observing as part of their secondary English methods fieldwork.

Data and Findings
Primary data sources include video recordings of students’ knowing and showing processes and products. Secondary data sources include reflective journals composed by myself and pre-service teachers, lesson plans, and other supplemental instructional materials. Findings from the “Spit What You Know” pre/post assessment offers insights into how The Shop cultivates hip-hop ill-literacies, and how they are used to share knowledge.

Significance
In accordance with the 2022 Annual Meeting’s theme, this study is timely as it supports education researchers and school leaders’ understandings of the power of hip-hop-based ILCs and the possibilities they hold for “destroying and rebuilding” traditional schooling contexts.

Author

• H. Bernard Hall, Drexel University