Beats Rhymes And Classroom Life

For over a decade, educators have looked to capitalize on the appeal of hip-hop culture, sampling its language, techniques, and styles as a way of reaching out to students. But beyond a fashionable hipness, what does hip-hop have to offer our schools? In this revelatory new book, Marc Lamont Hill shows how a serious engagement with hip-hop culture can affect classroom life in extraordinary ways. Based on his experience teaching a hip-hop–centered English literature course in a Philadelphia high school, and drawing from a range of theories on youth culture, identity, and educational processes, Hill offers a compelling case for the power of hip-hop in the classroom. In addition to driving up attendance and test performance, Hill shows how hip-hop–based educational settings enable students and teachers to renegotiate their classroom identities in complex, contradictory, and often unpredictable ways. “One of the most profound, searching, and insightful studies of what happens to the identities and worldviews of high school students who are exposed to a hip-hop curriculum." —Michael Eric Dyson, author, Can You Hear Me Now? “Hill’s book is a beautifully written reminder that the achievement gaps that students experience may be more accurately characterized as cultural gaps—between them and their teachers (and the larger society). This is a book that helps us see the power and potential of pedagogy.” —From the Foreword by Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin–Madison “Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life offers a vibrant, rigorous, and comprehensive analysis of hip-hop culture as an effective pedagogy, cultural politics, and a mobilizing popular form. This book is invaluable for anyone interested in hip-hop culture, identity, education, and youth.” —Henry Giroux, McMaster University “This book marks the time where our modern literature changes from entertainment to education. A study guide for our next generation using the modern day struggle into manhood and beyond.” —M-1 from dead prez

EDUCATION / Curricula

This expansive collection sets the stage for the next generation of Hip Hop scholarship as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the movement’s origins. Celebrating 50 years of Hip Hop cultural history, Freedom Moves travels across generations and beyond borders to understand Hip Hop’s transformative power as one of the most important arts movements of our time. This book gathers critically acclaimed scholars, artists, activists, and youth organizers in a wide-ranging exploration of Hip Hop as a musical movement, a powerful catalyst for activism, and a culture that offers us new ways of thinking and doing freedom. Rooting Hip Hop in Black freedom culture, this state-of-the-art collection presents a globally diverse group of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Arab, European, North African, and South Asian artists, activists, and thinkers. The “knowledges” cultivated by Hip Hop and spoken word communities represent emerging ways of being in the world. Freedom Moves examines how educators, artists, and activists use these knowledges to inform and expand how we understand our communities, our histories, and our futures.

Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.

Mumia Abu-Jamal and friend Marc Lamont Hill have an informal chat about the state of Black culture in the United States.

Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip Hop as Text, Pedagogy, and Lived Practice is the first book-length ethnography of young people and their uses of hip hop culture. Originally published in 2001, this second edition is newly revised, expanded, and updated to reflect contemporary currents in hip hop culture and critical scholarship, as well as the epochal social, cultural, and economic shifts of the last decade. Drawing together historical work on hip hop and rap music as well as four years of research at a local community center, Greg Dimitriadis argues here that contemporary youth are fashioning notions of self and community outside of school in ways educators have largely ignored. His studies are broad-ranging: how two teenagers constructed notions of a Southern tradition through their use of Southern rap artists like Eightball & MJG and Three 6 Mafia; how young people constructed notions of history through viewing the film Panther, a film they connected to hip hop culture more broadly; and how young people dealt with the life and death of hip hop icon Tupac Shakur, constructing resurrection myths that still resonate and circulate today.

Many educators already know that hip-hop can be a powerful tool for engaging students. But can hip-hop save our schools—and our society? Hip-Hop Genius 2.0 introduces an iteration of hip-hop education that goes far beyond studying rap music as classroom content. Through stories about the professional rapper who founded the first hip-hop high school and the aspiring artists currently enrolled there, Sam Seidel lays out a vision for how hip-hop’s genius—the resourceful creativity and swagger that took it from a local phenomenon to a global force—can lead to a fundamental remix of the way we think of teaching, school design, and leadership. This 10-year anniversary edition welcomes two new contributing authors, Tony Simmons and Michael Lipset, who bring direct experience running the High School for Recording Arts. The new edition includes new forewords from some of the most prominent names in education and hip-hop, reflections on ten more years of running a hip-hop high school, updates to every chapter from the first edition, details of how the school navigated the unprecedented complexities brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and uprising in response to the murder of George Floyd, and an inspiring new concluding chapter that is a call to action for the field.

This book highlights the unique and co-generative intersections of the arts and literacy that promote critical and socially engaged teaching and learning. Based on a year-long ethnography with two literacy teachers and their students in an arts-based public high school, this volume makes an argument for arts-based education as the cultivation of a critical aesthetic practice in the literacy classroom. Through rich example and analysis, it shows how, over time, this practice alters the in-school learning space in significant ways by making it more constructivist, more critical, and fundamentally more relational.