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There's Levels to This Ish: Toward a Theory of Hip-Hop Literacy Education
Conference paper   Open access

There's Levels to This Ish: Toward a Theory of Hip-Hop Literacy Education

H. Bernard Hall
Proceedings of the 2021 AERA Annual Meeting
09 Apr 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3102/1687380
url
https://doi.org/10.3102/1687380View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)Maybe Open Access (Publisher Bronze),  Restricted

Abstract

Thirty years ago, the body of research know known as “Hip-hop Based Education” (HHBE) (Hill, 2009) was addressing questions about whether hip-hop was a legitimate form worthy of canonization (Powell, 1991; Jeremiah, 1992). Does hip-hop belong in schools? Does rap music merit placement alongside “the best that has been thought and said” (Arnold, 1896)? Fifteen years ago we were asking, Does it work? and What does working mean? Morrell & Duncan Andrade (2002) showed how hip-hop texts serve to broaden students’ grasp of literary terms and figurative language in a “traditional” 12th grade poetry class in Northern California. Hill (2009) explained how critical readings of rap lyrics provide opportunities to negotiate complex lines of racial, aesthetic, class, and generational authenticity in his “Hip-hop Lit” course for youth at an alternative high school. More recently, HHBE scholars have pushed the field to think about what hip-hop pedagogy looks and feels like in secondary urban science (Emdin, 2016) and social studies classrooms (Stovall, 2006), as well as in “nice fields” like elementary school classrooms (Love, 2015). Irby and Hall’s (2011) study on participants in HHBE professional development workshops found that K-12 teachers, the vast majority of whom are “hip-hop cultural outsiders”, no longer need to be sold on why they should be using hip-hop in the classroom; they need to be told how to use hip-hop in the classroom. [1st paragraph]

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