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n 221 CHAPTER 9 Teaching Hip-Hop: A Pedagogy for Social Justice Education does more than help students memorize facts and formulas or prepare them for the workforce. It builds identity and prepares us for citizenship. Students of color have been denied opportunities to create and experiment with identity in Eurocentric classrooms that rarely affirm the existence and importance of African, American indigenous, Asian, and mixed-race peoples. Moreover, in a hostile environment where there have been consistent attacks on youth of color and their culture, schools do not help students develop critical thinking skills that help them resist these attacks and develop alternatives. Additionally, traditional classroom education in the United States is a top-down endeavor in which student strengths, language, and worldview are ignored in favor of a rigid and narrow set of pedagogical goals that include homogeneity, conformity, and adherence to rules of discipline, grammar, and worldview. From the perspective of the revolutionary Left and social-justice activists, capitalist education serves to normalize inequality and authoritarianism, reinforcing the existing power relations between the classes and benefiting the wealthy. I argue that utilizing student strengths, cultures, and perspectives we can create a hip-hop pedagogy of social justice that develops students’ critical thinking and language skills and knowledge in multiple academic fields. This critical pedagogy uses 222 n Chapter 9 hip-hop culture along with rap lyric texts and other aspects of black and Latin@ oral and literary histories to empower students to understand themselves and their world better, to develop their voice and validate their lives. Hip-hop can be used to assist in creating a social justice perspective that challenges injustice and oppression. Hiphop and other cultural texts are examined alongside feminist, decolonial, antiracist, anarchist, Marxist, and other critical scholarship and activism. My three-pronged social justice agenda includes a pedagogy of the erotic, pedagogy of racial justice, and pedagogy of peace. The work of Paolo Freire, bell hooks, and Marc Lamont Hill helped form the theoretical foundation of my hip-hop-based pedagogy. This essay examines how I have used hip-hop to inspire and empower students, teach academic content, and develop social justice awareness, thinking, and action. In addition, and importantly for this book, teaching hip-hop from this perspective enables students of Mexican origin to go beyond the limiting definitions of themselves that they encounter in schools, the media, and at home. Such a pedagogy can help them make ties to other peoples throughout the country and the world. A hip-hop pedagogy of social justice has the potential for the development of an internationalist perspective that challenges nationalism, cultural nationalism, and taken-for-granted notions of race, gender, and sexuality, and that promotes resistance to capitalism, colonialism, and other authoritarian systems. Generating Engaged Hip-Hop Pedagogies Hip-Hop-Based Education (HHBE) has been developed over the past decade in many universities throughout the United States. In U.S. cities, education faculty and graduate students use hip-hop in elementary and secondary classrooms. Since the mid-1990s, courses on hip-hop have been offered at many colleges and universities. However, few studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of hip-hop in the college classroom. This chapter examines how I generated hip-hop pedagogies in a number of college and university classroom settings. To begin, we should examine and understand how HHBE has been conducted. Additionally, the insights of Paolo Freire, bell hooks, and Marc Lamont Hill illustrate how a hip-hop pedagogy at the university level can succeed in attaining educational goals. My goals include developing a critical analytic perspective in students and providing them with concepts, theories, and a vocabulary to understand and change their society. This perspective examines social structures and systems and analyzes power. Additionally, my educational approach aspires to empower students to draw their own conclusions and seek more and better knowledge of our world and self so that they might begin to act upon our world in equitable, antiracist, and just ways. A Pedagogy for Social Justice n 223 Bell hooks’s engaged pedagogy expands upon the work of Paolo Freire and other educators. Freire notes that student teachers must be validated through generative themes. He argues, in essence, for a resource-based approach that begins the learning process from student strengths. From this perspective, we can see student culture as a resource from which to develop and expand their skills and knowledge, instead of as a hindrance to learning. Hooks (1994a) argues that...

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