Harnessing the Power of Hip-Hop in Education: An Exploration
by Larry Alexander
September 16, 2023
Imagine driving down the street when suddenly a car pulls up alongside, blaring a hip-hop track filled with potent lyrics, pulsating beats, and raw energy. The music reverberates through your body, making you acutely aware of its presence. Then, just as quickly as it arrived, the car disappears, and the world returns to its familiar rhythm.
This scenario has become increasingly common, reminding us that hip-hop is everywhere; it’s an inescapable force in modern culture. It permeates our radios, television screens, the internet, and even our classrooms. The question that arises is how to harness the undeniable influence of hip-hop effectively within the realm of education.
In this blog, I examine hip-hop-based education (HHBE) – a teaching approach that employs hip-hop culture and music as educational tools and where educators draw upon the dynamic elements of hip-hop to captivate students and connect with them on a cultural level.
However, the use of HHBE raises essential questions:
Is incorporating hip-hop in education merely a cop-out, or should it be an educational imperative?
Does hip-hop have the potential to elevate the learning experience?
Conversely, how can educators navigate the explicit content and negative themes prevalent in some hip-hop music, such as profanity, violence, and misogyny?
This blog aims to address these questions and provide valuable resources for anyone interested in the intersection of hip-hop and education, whether you’re a student, parent, educator, or simply intrigued by the educational journey of young minds.
In this post, there is a TEDx video, an article about the power of hip-hop music, a Goldman Sachs projection on hip-hop music sales, a definition of hip-hop, questions about hip-hop based education, a definition of hip-hop based education, a discussion on American education issues, and a brief book review on hip-hop based education.
We also meet Cassie Crim, Alex Fruchter, and Quam Neloms, three teachers who use hip-hop based education in their classrooms, and Nolan Jones, an Oakland, California, professor who trains teachers on hip-hop based education, curriculum, and practices.
In my next post, we will look at some of the negative aspects of hip-hop and rap; then we will discuss research on hip-hop based curriculum and practices.
Keep in mind that the research on this question is voluminous, and I am barely scratching the surface in terms of what is available. You can find some great articles on the Internet and on Google Scholar if you want to research this topic. Just search for articles on hip-hop in education.
Thank you for reading this post and for all of your thoughts and ideas!
Using Hip-Hop Based Education in the Classroom(HHBE)
Donna-Claire Chesman, an editor at DJBooth, examines the successful use of hip-hop in education in a 2018 article. She focuses on Cassie Crim, a Joliet West High School teacher in Illinois who incorporates hip-hop learning into her math classes, and Alex Fruchter, an Assistant Professor of Instruction at Chicago’s Columbia College who uses hip-hop learning in all three of his classes.
Cassie Crim
Cassie Crim has been teaching high school math for 10 years and did a rap video based upon a Cardi B song. After the video was released, Crim noticed more student participation and engagement in class. For example, one student said, “Ms. Crim, I can’t stand math, but dang, you doing this video caught me off guard and now I’m gonna have to really pay attention” (Chesman).
She knew that she had inspired that student. “He said that to me in the middle of class. Good! That was the purpose. I want to connect with my students, I wanna get them engaged and get that buy-in” (Chesman).
You can see a 2017 Cate Caugurian ABC interview with Crim here:
Alex Fruchter, a professor at Chicago’s Columbia College and co-owner of the indie music label Closed Sessions, is another teacher that incorporates hip-hop into his courses to help prepare students for life in the music industry. The courses are Business of Music, Applied Marketing: Music Business, and AEMMP Hip-Hop Practicum (Chesman).
He recognizes the relevance of using hip-hop in education when he asserts: “I use stories from Closed Sessions in all my classes, and I bring in artists, attorneys, music supervisors, booking agents, etc. in all my classes. I actually wrote a hip-hop based curriculum called ‘You Can Quote Me On That.’ It used hip-hop songs to teach psychology and sociology to elementary and high school students” (Chesman).
In his AEMMP practicum course, which is closely tied to hip-hop, students get the full label experience, which includes pitching the college for a budget, setting up studio sessions and events, and running social media campaigns (Chesman).
Fruchter argues that hip-hop based education is becoming more prevalent in the classroom because “Education is part of hip-hop culture…The fifth element of hip-hop is knowledge” (Chesman).
Quan Neloms
I came across a 2018 self-profile on Quan Neloms in the Education Post. Be sure to view the link in the Education Post below which contains a video on Neloms with some of his pupils.
Neloms is a Detroit public school teacher who uses hip-hop in the classroom to encourage his students to think creatively by analyzing hip-hop lyrics. He found that by engaging his students in hip-hop analysis, he was able to increase student achievement using a curriculum called Rhymes with Reason and increase test scores and achievement within a 10-week period (Neloms).
He also started the Lyricist Society nine years ago, a program that uses hip-hop to get students more involved in their learning. He calls it an important program because “The subjects and vocabulary utilized in hip-hop are tools that engage students in higher-level thinking. And seeing their own interests touted as brilliant and scholarly leads them to see themselves in the same light” (Neloms).
Research analyst Charloitte Götting prepared a 2018 report for Statista on album music consumption by genre. She found that hip-hop and rap are the most popular music in America and accounted for 21.7 percent of the music consumed by Americans, followed by pop with 20.1 percent, rock with 14 percent, and R&B with 10.6 percent (Götting).
Goldman Sachs also recognizes the popularity of hip-hop music and according to a 2019 article inForbes
forecast that music revenue is going to more than double to about $131 billion by 2030. Currently music streaming sales are dominated by top R&B and hip-hop artists such as Drake, Kendrick Lamar, The Weekend, Migos and Cardi B. Music publishers and labels also stand to profit greatly from the rise of streaming, led by black listeners who are the largest user group…R&B and hip-hop are music’s most consumed genre and leading the industry’s revival (Hale).
These articles highlight the significance of hip-hop music, which has exploded in worldwide popularity since its origin in the 1970s in the South Bronx.
Because of the influence of hip-hop on young people, a number of educators and scholars have used it in the classroom to motivate and inspire student learning. Although people have different opinions on the effectiveness of this approach, it is being used more and more frequently to teach students about subjects like math, science, and English.
Origin of Hip-Hop
Hip-hop originated in the South Bronx in the 1970s by Black and Latino teens and is composed of four* elements: deejaying (aka turntabling), rapping (aka MCing or rhyming), graffiti painting (aka graf), B-boying (hip-hop dance, style, attitude, and body language), *knowledge of self/consciousness is sometimes added by socially conscious hip-hop artists and scholars (Tate).
Questions About Hip-Hop Based Education or Pedagogy (HHBE)
Some of the questions asked about this topic include: What is hip-hop based education? Who supports it? Who opposes it? Is there a hip-hop based curriculum? Is there certification or training? Who is qualified to teach it? Who is using hip-hop based education in classes? How do you measure if it works? Are all grade levels appropriate for hip-hop based education? Who funds hip-hop based education?
What is Hip-Hop Based Education?
A 2015 article by professors Edmund Adjapong and Christopher Emdin in the Journal of Urban Learning on the use of hip-hop pedagogy defined it “as a way of authentically and practically incorporating the creative elements of Hip-Hop into teaching, and inviting students to have a connection with the content while meeting them on their cultural turf by teaching to, and through their realities and experiences” (Adjapong and Emdin 67).
Education Issues
In 2008, Chance Lewis and other researchers at Texas A&M University examined the educational performance of African American students in urban school settings, the consistent Black-White achievement gap, and recommendations on how to close the gap. They also looked at previous research on Black and White student achievement- including studies that assumed the reality of high African American academic failure, blamed the learner for their academic situation, or demonstrated that African American learners went through periods of academic successes and failures (Lewis et al. 127-128).
They conclude with this thought: “Nearly 9 out of 10 African American students attending urban schools… are not meeting proficiency rates in reading and math. It is not possible to imagine a situation more bleak and disparate than the educational crisis in urban America…We reluctantly concede that in its current condition, American education is ill-equipped to meet the needs of African American learners, particularly those in urban educational settings” (Lewis et al. 148).
Education writer Kate Barrington also addresses failures in American education in a 2022 article in Public School Review. She summarizes 15 problems with the American education system, including rising violence, student poverty, lower performance on standardized tests, mental health challenges, a lack of parental involvement, a lack of teacher innovation, and teachers using outdated teaching methods and failing to meet the needs of their students (Barrington).
These essays raise the question: Can hip-hop based learning help to address a system that is failing to meet the needs of its students?
Can Hip-Hop Based Learning Address Education Issues?
The Harvard Educational Review examines the 2013 book on this topic called Schooling Hip-Hop: Expanding Hip-Hop Based Education Across the Curriculum by scholars Marc Lamont Hill Emery Petchauer.
Marc Lamont Hill and Emery Petchauer
Hill and Petchauer support using hip-hop based learning in the classroom to address some of the failures in American education. However, they recognize a need for a “deeper aesthetic, epistemological, and theoretical engagement with hip-hop as a holistic cultural movement” beyond teachers who use rhymes to help students memorize facts or to encourage adherence to dress codes. Both support additional research on hip-hop culture and how HHBE can be used in subjects other than English (qtd in Harvard).
The book’s contributors emphasize that although using rap and rhymes to help students with memory is popular, hip-hop pedagogy extends beyond teachers who rap. They advocate finding alternatives to using “rappin” as the main teaching tool and call for more educational focus on knowledge of self, the fifth element of hip-hop (qtd in Harvard).
As one example of how hip-hop pedagogy extends beyond teachers who rap, one of the the book’s contributors, Derek Pardue, shows how hip-hop is being used to influence how Brazilians see citizenship and education. he describes how the Canhema Cultural Center in Rio de Janeiro was initially operated by the government but subsequently turned over to a committee and later became known as the “Hip-Hop House,” which focuses on the relationship between the hip-hop arts and Brazilian hip-hop cultural forms (qtd in Harvard).
According to the Harvard Educational Review, one weakness of their research is its inability to draw a strong connection between hip-hop pedagogy and academic content; however, Hill and Petchauer persuasively promote the importance of hip-hop pedagogy in each chapter of the book (Harvard).
Teaching Hip-Hop Based Education
Although it sounds reasonable to promote addressing education issues with hip-hop based learning, how do teachers learn how to teach it?
Professor Nolan Jones of Mills College in Oakland, California, addresses this question in a 2020 essay. He highlights teachers who use the most popular music in America to make subjects more relevant to their students. One instructor teaches high school math and uses rap in her class, another uses rap to study current events and history, and a third has his students study rap lyrics for college vocabulary and concepts relating to American history (Jones).
He calls this type of teaching hip-hop pedagogy, or teaching that uses the popularity of hip-hop to motivate student learning, and he says each of the teachers using it has seen improvement in pupil test scores and achievement (Jones).
Jones has taught hip-hop pedagogy courses for the last 10 years for K-12 teachers and for higher education teachers, and he believes that the courses can help connect students to subjects from Shakespeare to neuroscience. According to him, the keys to teaching hip-hop pedagogy are for teachers to be genuine, avoid gimmicks, and keep their instruction relevant to the subject matter (Jones).
He also recognizes the importance of almost 30 years of scholarly research examining the effectiveness of hip-hop in education and says the research “has found that hip-hop can be used to teach critical thinking skills, critical literacy, media literacy skills, STEM skills, critical consciousness and more.” In addition, over 300 colleges and universities now offer courses on hip-hop, despite initial questions about the validity of this approach (Jones).
Jones argues that teachers need to use hip-hop culture to reach students because “Many students are already forming their views of society and the world based on the lyrics of their favorite rap artists. It only makes sense to infuse what they’re already listening to into the class so that – at the very least – there’s a common point of reference” (Jones).
Final Thoughts
I hope this blog raised questions in your mind about the use of hip-hop based education in the classroom. We looked at the popularity of hip-hop, educational issues, and educators who support using it as a tool to motivate and inspire students. Supporters claim improvement in motivation, learning, and test scores. If you found this post informative, please share it with your friends and colleagues to see what they think.
You can also send me your thoughts at tutorwithlarry@gmail.com.
In my next post, we will look at opposition to using hip-hop based education in the classroom.
Thank you again for reading this post and for all of your ideas on this issue!
Works Cited
Adjapong, Edmund S., and Christopher Emdin. “Rethinking Pedagogy in Urban Spaces: Implementing Hip-Hop Pedagogy in the Urban Science Classroom.” Journal of Urban Learning, Teaching, and Research, vol.11, pp. 66-77, 2015.
Barrington, Kate. “The 15 Biggest Failures of the American Public Education System.” Public School Review, 27 May 2022.
Caugurian, Cate. “Rapping Joliet Math Teacher Creates Viral Video to Help Students.” ABC7 Chicago, WLS-TV, 5 Nov. 2017.
Chesman, Donna-Claire. “From the Crates to the Classroom: Legitimizing Hip-Hop in Education.” DJBooth, 14 Feb. 2018.
Götting, Marie Charlotte. “Music Album Consumption in the U.S. by Genre 2018.” Statista, 8 Jan. 2021.
Hale, Kori. “Goldman Sachs Bets on Hip Hop and Millennials for Music Revival.” Forbes, 6 Feb. 2019.
Harvard Educational Review. “About Schooling Hip-Hop: Expanding Hip-Hop Based Education Across the Curriculum.” vol. 84, Winter 2022.
Jones , Nolan. “Why Hip-Hop Belongs in Today’s Classrooms.” The Conversation, 20 Nov. 2020.
Lewis, Chance W., et al. “Framing African American Students’ Success and Failure in Urban Settings.” Urban Education, vol. 43, no. 2, 2008, pp. 127–153.
Neloms , Neloms. “Literacy Powered by Students’ Favorite Music.” Rhymes with Reason, 3 May 2022.
Neloms, Quan “Video: This Detroit Teacher Uses Hip-Hop Literacy to Engage His Students and the Community.” Education Post, 2017.
Neloms, Quan. “What Is Lyricist Society?” YouTube, 2 Feb. 2016.
“Rapping Joliet Math Teacher Creates Viral Video to Help Students.” ABC7 Chicago, 5 Nov. 2017.
Tate, Greg, et al. “Hip-Hop.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 12 Jan. 2023.
Throughout my nine years of teaching college English, my guiding philosophy has been straightforward: my students were the focal point of my attention. They deserved respect, and each one brought their unique life narrative to the table.
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