The reading for this week covers the topic surrounding critical pedagogy and hip-hop pedagogy, it focuses on the uses of hip-hop to create a base for students to evaluate and understand issues that surround the hip-hop biases. Although we look at these biases as in the past, would it be beneficial to use in current day education to grasp our students’ attention, looking further into it though we have to ask ourselves how hip-hop can be used to help social justice within our youths’ lives, and how does it relate to being critical like it is used in critical pedagogy?

When I think of using hip-hop in the classroom I think it is a great way to bring in social justice and youth activism within our classroom. Akom explains that schools should be integrating hip-hop into the classroom and curricula. Although I think it’s a great way to bring in social justice and youth activism, I think it has to be introduced slowly and integrated into the classroom properly to avoid students and parents getting the wrong idea. Hip-hop brings a variety of different topics that need to be addressed in a controlled environment. When relating this to critical pedagogy, hip-hop is a new and relevant way to capture your student’s attention, and a good way to engage your students with something they can relate to. By having your students engaged you are able to introduce important content and have your students interested in ways that they may be able to make a change.

By using videos and music as a tool from hip-hop artists, we can have our students analyze what the music video or song lyrics means since many artists’ critique communities, society, national issues as well as government issues. When we have our students analyze these topics, they are free to agree or disagree, and this will open a controlled discussion in classrooms because it is such a relevantly new topic students are more likely to engage. This will result in more engagement and interest hopefully in and out of the classroom. This is a more evolved way for educators to implement critical thought within our classrooms with higher volumes of engagement.

References

Akom, A. A.(2009). Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy as a Form Of Liberatory Praxis

Equity & Excellence in Education 42(1), 52-66. DOI:10.1080/10665680802612519