Hip-hop turns 40 this year. As it does, Harvard creates
a fellowship in Nas’ name. Hip-hop archives stand in the distinguished libraries of that school and Cornell. Keeping apace is hip-hop education, an approach to the education of disenfranchised youths that uses the values of hip-hop to inform all aspects of schooling.
Hip-hop education is not about an English teacher handing out a verse by 2Pac during a poetry unit. Hip-hop education goes much deeper; its aim is to infuse all aspects of schooling, from the classes that are taught to the way they're taught to the building they're taught in.
When Sam Seidel, a scholar in residence at Columbia University, began writing his book
Hip Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education, he Googled the phrase "hip hop pedagogy" and found not one hit. Today there are tens of thousands.
Seidel was born one year before the seminal hip-hop song “
Rapper's Delight,” by the Sugar Hill Gang, was pressed to vinyl. Growing up, he spent hours at night listening to artists such as Run-D.M.C., Nas, and Common Sense. During the day he was attending alternative public schools with singular teaching methods, a result of being raised by two forward-thinking educators.
“My whole life I have been in the mix of alternative education and public education,” Seidel says. “At the same time, I grew up alongside hip-hop culture. To have them come together was a natural progression.”
While Seidel was teaching in a juvenile prison at age 20, the two subjects fused in his mind, presenting him with his life’s work. The students were disengaged until the subject of hip-hop arose and led to a freestyling session. After that, the class began to function, and relationships that were made there lasted for years.
“Hip-hop offered a rich culture with text relating to music, to dance, to visual arts, to language, and vocabulary,” Seidel says. “That’s where this idea for the book and for this teaching philosophy all started to gel.”
In his book, Seidel studies the High School for Recording Arts in St. Paul, Minn., where he believes hip-hop and education have found an almost perfect union. The students operate within and around a professional recording studio to which they earn access by completing academic projects—each informed by hip-hop and its philosophy—in the core learning areas of English, math, science, and social studies.
Seidel breaks down his observations on hip-hop philosophy in his lectures, which he begins with “Keeping it real.” The phrase is pervasive in hip-hop music, he says, because of its core importance to the culture. He believes that to engage
America’s most disengaged young people, schools must respect this value. In practice that means that lessons must have clear relevance to the real worlds and cultures of these students.
Consequently, Seidel advocates for project-based learning in which students learn from the community and create output that could be used by that community. The students in Minnesota worked with state agencies and State Farm Insurance on a music-based public advocacy campaign about seat belt laws. They produced a logo, a website, and a high-production commercial. They followed that up with a tour around the country about the importance of staying in school.
“Many of these students had been kicked out of school, and for them to be in school and talking about staying in school was very powerful,” Seidel says. He saw similar projects inspire entrepreneurialism in the kids in prison youth programs, which in turn empowered them to earn diplomas.
Swagger and audacity are other components he names in hip-hop pedagogy. Seidel recently told an audience at Harvard about how the founder of HRSA, despite complaints from the district, changed the school’s start time to 10 a.m. to reduce truancy and tardiness. Though everyone assumed there was a rule about when school must start, in fact, no such requirement existed.
Seidel said that many of the students at HSRA were homeless and had children of their own but through the creative curriculum were able to succeed.
Using hip-hop in the classroom once had negative connotations, Seidel says, and teachers would get in trouble if they incorporated rap music and graffiti into their lesson planning. Not anymore. He travels the world lecturing (he was recently at Brown and Harvard, then in Australia) on the lessons he learned at HSRA.
“It’s a new time period when a lot of 30- to 40-year-olds, who grew up listening to this kind of music, are in leadership positions,” Seidel says. “We have a president who has
Jay-Z on his iPod.”
Seidel’s position at Columbia is through the Hip Hop Education Center in New York, a joint project with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and New York University. Just this month the center put on its third and most successful annual "Hip Hop Education Think Tank." The sheer size of the event, with 90 presenters and several hundred attendees from 27 countries, convinced Seidel that the movement has grown enormously over the past 10 years, or at least, he says, “come out from the underground.”
Every Tuesday night at 9 p.m. ET, Seidel and others chat on Twitter about topics related to education discipline under the hashtag #HipHopEd. Usually, he says, more than 100 people from all over the world participate.
“To keep it relevant means to constantly bring people into the fold," Seidel says. “It’s become a really vital community. This has been a huge cultural force in my life, as well as other people’s lives, and it’ll likely remain so. It’s the lens through which I see the rest of the world."
