In this week’s blog post, I am going to be focusing on the “Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy as a Form of Liberatory Praxis” article by A. A. Akom. Hip hop is a product of Black people’s long history of resistance and struggle for freedom. In today’s society, hip hop is incorporated into people’s lives in a variety of ways, including media, sports, fashion, and music as a means of artistic expression and communication. Hip hop is often perceived unfavorably or as something that occurs outside of school in places like the “bloc,” “street,” “hood,” “club,” after school, after dark, and in unique social areas designated for “play” which is not the entirety of hip hop (Akom, 2009, p.53). This article goes into great detail explaining how hip hop is more than what many people think it is and how important it is to have a pedagogy approach to incorporating hip hop within a classroom. The Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) program is a tool within a classroom that “may respond to concerns of racism and other dimensions of social difference that Black people/people of color encounter in urban and suburban schools and communities,” is a reason why one would teach hip hop in the classroom (54). This program aspires teachers a place in teacher education courses to reevaluate their knowledge of hip hop as it intersects with race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, as well as by analyzing and theorizing to what extent hip hop can be used as a tool for social justice in teacher education and beyond, this approach seeks to address deeply ingrained ideologies to social inequities (52). Hip hop may help people express who they are by giving them a variety of options to express their sex, race, culture, and other identities. Hip hop can also be used as “tools for helping student teachers to identify and name the societal and systemic problems students of color face, analyze the causes of the problem, and find solutions” (63). Hip hop in the classroom improves a variety of relationships, including those between students and teachers, between students, and even between a student and their own culture or community.
Education