Hip-Hop Culture in College Students' Lives: Elements, Embodiment, and Higher Edutainment ed. by Emery Petchauer (review)

Hip-Hop Culture in College Students' Lives encourages new critical thought and analysis among educators, campus personnel and researchers regarding the value of hip-hop culture in enhancing college students' learning and development. Unveiled through an artistic approach to inquiry, a portrait is presented of how students who create hip-hop integrate its ideology, aesthetics and practices into their college lives.

In chapter 1, Petchauer traces the trajectory of hip-hop from its advent in the Bronx during the early 1970s to its current day arrival on college campuses. He lays out several perspectives relative to conflicting views of hip-hop, which higher education scholars have used in describing hip-hop among college students. Additionally, he argues college personnel's misperceptions about hip-hop have created misunderstanding regarding its value in students' lives. The author advocates for a broad artistic approach from which to view, analyze and apply hip-hop culture.

Chapter 2 describes the method employed in this study. Using a phenomenological approach, the author conducted a series of in-depth interviews to explore the cipher (i.e., hip-hop spaces and places) of college students at three diverse higher education institutions in the U.S. Central to the investigation is the concept of hip-hop collegians (a subculture of college students from diverse gender, socioeconomic, and ethnic/racial backgrounds, immersed in hip-hop culture, and who intertwine hip-hop with their college experiences). World view is presented as the conceptual framework used to contextualize how hip-hop exists in students' lives and how they make it relevant to education.

Chapter 3 introduces the reader to the underground (the diverse spaces, places and artistic ways students create hip-hop on, off and around campus), which is an integral part of the college experiences of hip-hop collegians. Students share that hip-hop affects every aspect of their identity from the music they listen and dance to, to interactions with others or how they approach learning. The author contends that campus environments that do not acknowledge and take advantage of the educational value of hip-hop culture may encourage students to seek it out in surrounding areas off-campus.

In chapter 4, Petchauer discusses how hip-hop collegians integrate aesthetic forms of hip-hop in their academic disciplines using many of the same strategies and techniques of hip-hop artistry. Several scenarios were described relative to the clash that sometimes exists between aesthetic forms of hip-hop and traditional teaching philosophies. According to the author, these conflicts may impede student learning, engagement, and emotional health. The author argues that educators would be better positioned to serve the needs of hip-hop collegians if they developed a deeper understanding of the genre and worked to integrate the ways in which these students experience hip-hop into the structure of higher education.

Both chapters 5 and 6 primarily examine the habits and practices of hip-hop collegians. Readers are invited into the lives of students who approach their education by applying the concepts of edutainment (the combination of education and entertainment), kinetic consumption (affective responses used to engage with the world) and sampling (taking the best from a wide variety of sources and creating something new and relevant) to their campus lives.

Petchauer also suggests that some students may develop a level of critical consciousness from hip-hop while others may not. Thus, he challenges educators to rethink hip-hop as a position from which students may be able to develop critical consciousness. Campus personnel should focus on the opportunity to help students draw explicit connections between the content and production of hip-hop and the political and social realities that exist in the world.

The book concludes in chapter 7 with a model designed to assist educators in understanding hip-hop collegians on their campuses. The model integrates the key elements that emerged in the lives of the hip-hop collegians studied...