Hip-Hop Career Counseling: A Community Approach

• In Event: 29.064 - Hip-Hop-Influenced Mental Health and Wellness Interventions: Experiences From the Field

Abstract

This paper chronicles the experience co-designing a 9-week, afterschool, hip-hop focused, career exploration intervention with the department of Youth Development & Education, a national non-profit organization. The rationale for this intervention is the oft-cited need for more consistent postsecondary career exploration services for African American secondary students. In accordance with the tenets of multicultural school counseling practice (Holcomb-McCoy, 2004), this intervention tethered students’ exploration of post-secondary options to their resonant appreciation for hip-hop culture, and youth culture more broadly. Additionally, because hip-hop culture is inextricably sutured to a tradition of critical resistance to racial and economic oppression, this intervention encouraged students to envisage how their future career aspirations could help subvert institutions and institutional practices that encroach on the life opportunities of people existing at the intersection of various forms of oppression. Each week, through a combination of hip-hop lyrics and videos, educational documentaries, and excerpts from various assigned reading (i.e., Warmth from Other Sons), participants explored a new academic discipline (i.e., psychology, sociology, etc.) and discussed how these disciplines are relevant to their lives. Participants journaled for the duration of the intervention, and passages from these journals will be presented during the symposium. The implications of this intervention on the school counseling program at one urban school counseling program will also be discussed.

Author

• Ahmad Rashad Washington, University of Louisville