Transforming Teacher Education Through Emancipatory Forms of Hip-Hop Culture

• In Event: 25.012 - The Curriculum of Lines of Flight in Transformative Pedagogies: Resistances in the Age of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Overview and Purpose:
Over the past decade, neoliberal ideology, grounded in the alleged power of free market forces and rugged individualism to improve quality of life, has infiltrated every aspect of teacher education (Sleeter, 2008). Numerous scholars have pinpointed how this ideology has blocked teacher educators from suggesting how their students can offer humanizing forms of education, and instead emphasize a technicist view of teaching narrowly focused on achievement as defined by test scores (e.g., Au & Tempel, 2010). Despite the intrusion of corporatist forces in teacher education, we suggest some iterations of Hip-Hop culture can be harnessed to create preservice pedagogical projects as a part of a teacher education curriculum dedicated to making youth fully human.

Perspectives:
Guided by the work of scholars supporting dialectical understandings of education, such as McLaren (2009), we believe schools function simultaneously as sites of domination and liberation (p. 62). Therefore, teacher educators must remain partisan and guide students to question what is responsible for asymmetrical relations of power and how to work collectively to foster non-exploitative relations and social justice (Ibid). We argue that iterations of Hip-Hop can afford students this critical insight.

Methodology and Data Sources:
Our data are gleaned from four case studies (Stake, 1995) conducted with Hip-Hop artists in schools and community sites in Houston, Toronto, and New York. The researchers conducted interviews with artists, analyzed the content of student writing samples, and analyzed dance narratives generated by youth. The cases were chosen purposefully because each represents elements of Hip-Hop predicated on bringing awareness to oppression in schools and society (Akom, 2009). Although neither causal nor correlative relationships are being assumed, together the case studies qualitatively elaborate a process otherwise difficult to illustrate individually (Creswell, 2013).

Results:
The Hip-Hop artists suggest how detailing their own personal struggles via social media with systemic injustices, along with providing the audience the time to reflect upon how their own identities are mediated by webs of power, has the potency to foster in youth a sense of awareness and agency. Giving youth outlets to produce rap narratives, where they suggest why Hip-Hop ought to be taught in schools, has the potential for students to become active members of both Hip-Hop and traditional schooling culture. Hip-Hop intellectuals who employed dance as pedagogical projects also ensured that youth built analytical and collaborative tools of community and mobilization as well as to garner an understanding of urban arts that stretches past aesthetic to an understanding of art as propaganda.

Significance:
The creation of cultural hip hop projects have the potency to spark youths’ intellectual desire to critically understand the nature of their social world and to become active in transforming it. In our current era of accountability, which positions students as mere numbers, there is an immediate need for teacher educators to provide students of teaching these types of guideposts. From our study, we draw implications and recommendations for teacher educators to use this type of pedagogy to develop teachers who can provide youth a humanizing education.

Author

• Bradley J. Porfilio, Seattle University