Challengers of the Unknown: Exploring the Intersections of Hip-Hop, Comics, and Critical Pedagogy

• In Event: Hip-Hop, Comics, and Speculative Education: (Re)Storying Equitable Education for the 23rd Century

Abstract

Purpose
This presentation considers both hip hop and comics as cultural resources and heritages that explore complex historical, social, and political issues with powerful, emblematic immediacy. And, as such, how their collective presence in educational spaces can serve to promote critical consciousness creation as well as democratic and civic engagement. To that end, this essay takes up several questions:
What are the axiological and epistemic linkages between these two artistic forms?
What opportunities might understanding rhetorical and ideological synergy afford students and teachers for critical literacy development?
Theoretical framework
In order to examine the rhetorical, philosophical and aesthetic linkages as well as the pedagogical implications for teaching and learning, this paper draws from a variety of theoretical frameworks and perspectives including Hip Hop Based Education (Hill, 2009), Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2009), Critical Multimodal Literacies (Ajayi, 2015) and Comics Studies (Beaty; Groensteen, Low). These critical perspectives are particularly appropriate as a transdisciplinary approach to research and education affords us opportunities to develop robust and dynamic means of investigating critical meaning making across a variety of forms, eras, and communities. In short, this interdisciplinary approach invites us to engage in a liminal approach to envisioning what speculative author Octavia Butler called “new suns” that is, new ways of envisioning and embodying notions of freedom, equity, and justice.
Methods, modes of inquiry
Guided by the theoretical framework of CRT in education (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) with a particular emphasis in counternarratives, this paper draws upon multiple critical and analytic frameworks. These include ideographic analysis (McGee, 1980) and thematic analysis (Clarke & Braun, 2013) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2013) in an effort to explore overlapping sociopolitical, ideological, and cultural commitments made across these forms and investigate their potential import for teaching and learning.
Data sources
This paper engages a variety of media including hip hop texts (graffiti, rap, samples, etc.), popular printed comic and graphica texts and TV/film adaptations. It also examines student created artifacts including original artwork, lyrics, and other applicable audio/visual data points.
Significance of the study or work
It is through an expansion of the interpretive strategies and perspectives that learners bring to these texts, that students can become more proficient in their interpretive processes and consequently ability to critique ideological status quo as well as capacity to create new forms on their own terms. This involves embracing new potentials for reconfiguring student agency by providing opportunities for students to reshape and rethink resources in ways that are aligned with their needs and interests (Kress, 2004).
Significance here is tied to collaborating alongside students to comprehend and compose meaning(s) across diverse, rich, and potentially complex texts, and to do so using a range of methods. Ultimately, engaging hip hop, comics, and pedagogy invites scholars to engage in “Transformed Practice[s]” (Cadzen, et al., 1996, p. 89) that engage counternarratives as a model of speculative inquiry, critical reflection and generativity as praxis, and democratic engagement as a fundamental goal toward imagining and realizing educational equity.

Author

• Michael B. Dando, St Cloud State University