Processing COVID-19 and Racial Injustice Through Hip-Hop Mixtape Making: A School Counseling Intervention

• In Event: The Inequitable Impact of COVID-19 on Education: A Crisis or an Opportunity?

Abstract

The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the potential of a hip-hop school counseling group as a social justice intervention. Tuck and Yang (2020), frame social justice as not beholden to teleological understandings of “cause and effect” (i.e. a singular and linear path from oppression to an agreed upon and “right way” of doing justice), and instead as an “imperative”; justice as a “direction,” not as an “end” (p. 11).
Given this epistemic framing, the authors contend that school counselors are responsible for delivering group counseling interventions that position youth as experts in their own lives and experiences, who can be supported in pinpointing and developing solutions to real world problems. Recent studies have examined the use of a hip-hop based youth participatory action research small-group, where youth wrote, recorded and performed hip-hop songs about issues they deem relevant to their lives - called the Critical Cycle of Mixtape Creation (CCMC; Levy et al., 2018). The CCMC as a culturally responsive/sustaining approach to small-group counseling evidenced as effective in reducing stress, anxiety and depression amongst youth participants (Levy & Travis, 2020). Thus, during the current study a graduate school counseling student facilitated multi-week CCMC small-group.
This small-group was delivered virtually during the 2020-2021 school year, to students at a high school in an urban city in the northeast, to offer a platform for youth to make sense of COVID-19 and racial injustice in real time.

Data sources included one-on-one interviews with the group facilitator and high school students, as well as the high students annotated hip-hop lyrics. These data were used to understand two questions: 1) Using individual interviews, how do school counselors perceive the impact of their hip-hop small-group facilitation on a student's understanding of social justice? And 2) Using student lyrics and interviews, how do students report on their understanding of social justice? Transcriptions of interviews and student lyrics were coded using an interpretive phenomenological analysis, with further discourse analysis, intended to make meaning of youths' experiences within the group as it pertains to their understandings of social justice.
Results indicate that school counselors who utilize hip-hop based action research in small groups can aid their students in developing an increased emotional self-awareness, awareness of racial injustice, and awareness of their local and global sociopolitical context; even as this study considers ongoing areas for growth in further development of CCMC.
The significance of this study is vast, given the need to leverage culturally responsive/sustaining counseling services that broach difficult conversations with youth, and active them as social justice leaders. Youth who participate in the CCMC process with their school counselor are also able process emotions surrounding real-world issues as they unfold, offering opportunities for healing. Additionally, this culturally responsive/sustaining small-group was administered fully remotely, which holds promise for how school counseling services are delivered moving forward.

Authors

• Ian Levy, Manhattan College

• Casey Philip Wong, University of California - Los Angeles