Week #8

Hip Hop can be used as a tool to promote social justice and youth activism in the classrooms by breaking so many barriers that have been placed in our school system. The first is the barrier in the relationship between the teachers and the students. For what seems like forever there is a bad relationship between the students and the teachers. Making it so that the teachers feel unapproachable to the students. This makes students believe that they have to lie, cheat, and hide things from the teacher instead of being honest, working hard, and sharing everything with the teachers. As it is said in the article “Hip Hop is the dominant language of youth culture, and those of us who work with young people need to speak their language” (De Leon, 2004, p. 1). It makes so much sense that if we are to be teaching the students then we do not make the come to us, but we go to them. We need to “speak their language”, do what works for them, and engage in their interests. There is also a barrier that has banded African American culture from the schools. Students are able to listen to rap, dressing most rugged, and hip hop are all deemed as belonging “in da streets” so they are not approved for the school. However, we could us hip hop “as a method for organizing African American youth around issues that are important to their survival” (p. 35). By breaking the barrier that tells African American students that what they do is wrong or bad we encourage them to participate in hip hop instead of other things that could lead to crime, drugs, and dropping out of school. Finally, we can use hip hop to bring student together and help them want to come to school. Schools can use “hip hop as a tool for illuminating problems of poverty, police brutality, patriarchy, misogyny, incarceration, racial discrimination, as well as love, hope, joy” (54).

The relationship between hip hop culture and the development of critical consciousness amongst students is their need to feel heard, that they can make a change and that what they say and do matters. In the article, it says that “students viewing schools as key mechanisms in the reproduction of inequality rather than places where education is seen as a practice of freedom, a place to build critical consciousness, and social mobility (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2002). When we do not engage with students and make them feel like an individual, we continue to push an idea that we are just trying to get them in and out of school. The reality is that school is a journey that can lead to critical consciousness. It can only be attained, however, when agendas are not applied to students, but agendas are made to help students learn and develop what they need to grow and learn.