Hip-hop as a vehicle for learning and social change

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip-hop in Bronx, New York City.

Ever since, hip-hop has undergone various changes and transitions, from being a voice for poor and racialised Americans – rapping over beats about the injustices they routinely face – to one of the world’s most commercially successful musical genres.

Speaking with TRT World recently, Canadian hip-hop scholar, historian, and educator Francesca D'Amico-Cuthbert illuminates what often (and unfortunately) is overlooked about hip-hop, namely its educational value and potential. To do so she draws from both her personal and professional experience, illustrating how hip-hop can be employed as a teaching style or “pedagogy” that introduces students to unique lived experience or histories, left outside mainstream discussion, as well as how they can be engaged with to ultimately create a world that is more fair and just.

We hear a lot today about “hip-hop pedagogy” becoming part of curricula at different levels of education, from grade school to university. And instructors seem to be employing it in a wide range of ways that defy it being reduced to one single definition. How do you view or understand hip-hop pedagogy?

FRANCESCA D'AMICO-CUTHBERT: I think hip-hop pedagogy is often understood as exploring creative aspects of hip-hop in a classroom context. For example, taking a rap song and distilling it down to, you know, the literary components and teaching it within the context of the English class – looking at it as poetry, validating that it is a form of poetry. That’s certainly a part of hip-hop pedagogy and I think that tends to be the most common way that it's approached from a pedagogical perspective. But for me hip-hop pedagogy is applying hip-hop to thinking critically about culture, as a way of being in the world – sociologically, philosophically, historically. It’s also about interrogating what happens in the classroom itself, from what is taught to how teachers engage with students to the possibility of approaching education as a liberatory practice. That might include questioning the nature of school administration, how it imposes forms of detention or punishment on students. Hip-hop pedagogy, drawing from, say, the lyrics of political rap song, might ask: What does hip-hop think about these issues? What might it reveal about how students experience them?

How do you feel hip-hop, whether we’re talking about pedagogy or the larger music culture it represents, squares – or not – with the current school system, at least in North America?

FDC: The institution of schooling sees itself as a liberatory practice. That it's a way toward freedom of thought, accessing knowledge, growing and progressing in one's life, having certain educational opportunities. But that's not always how students see schooling. That’s apparent for example when something is not taught in a history class that students discover on their own at the library, which in turn makes students frustrated. They start asking questions about why they aren't learning this in the class. Sometimes there’s anger on the part of students who feel like something is being withheld from them and it pushes them forward in their thinking, expands their imagination.

Hip-hop did that for a lot of young people, particularly in the 1980s and through creating rap about police violence, racism, poverty, and so forth. Today I'm seeing it being used for instructional purposes and to impress on people that there's entire histories that have been withheld from young people and communities. That’s made people generally more curious about why institutions like schools, media, government have withheld the knowledge conveyed by hip-hop. Knowledge that illuminates difficult lived experiences that don’t necessarily mirror or complement mainstream views. You can see how that can become part of a deeper, political conversation, right?

What’s happening here is more than just taking the elements of hip hop – DJing, breakdancing, rapping, graffiti art – and infusing them in a curriculum. That can be a starting point for some educators and certainly each one is going to feel, you know, differently or more comfortable with using hip-hop pedagogy to enter political conversation with students. But I think those teachers who may have a fulsome awareness of what hip-hop is – a practice through which to probe and creatively express dissenting views about the society they live in – will take that opportunity.

Aside from your teaching responsibilities, how else do you see or understand your role within the context of hip-hop pedagogy? I partly ask because I recognize that so much of what you do, when it comes to such pedagogy, starts and remains outside the classroom.

FDC: As a scholar I think my role is more to sit back and observe the process of how hip-hop pedagogy is developing in schools, the form it takes within them over time. In my capacity as the Chief Research Officer at the Hip-Hop Education Center I'm also concerned with the professionalization of the larger field of hip-hop. So, if it is a goal of ours [hip-hop educators], which it is, to bring hip-hop into systems of education – from teaching that lesson about a Tupac rap song to incorporating narratives of lived experience, expressed in hip-hop, into how students learn well – my focus will be on how to give teachers the tools they need to actually implement that in the classroom. How can we establish reliable standards, translatable across different sectors of education, to measure the success of that? How do we make it relatively seamless for teachers to integrate hip-hop at various points of the lessons they deliver?

Artists are also experts on how we can bring hip-hop into the classroom, insofar as they know how to and have succeeded to meaningfully connect with audiences. This has led to people, internationally, who make up those audiences changing their viewpoints, getting people to think about things they previously didn’t consider and learn about the specificities of the world they live in and share with one another. Artists can work in partnership with teachers who understand the broader education system and together produce a curriculum that’s engaging in the classroom context. That’s not simply about presenting students with information they passively absorb.

How accommodating has Canada – where you are – been towards hip-hop?

FDC: I think there's always been this interesting phenomenon, an unfair stereotype really, that Canada has never embraced hip-hop. Aside from this there’s also been actual vilification of hip-hop in the country. That’s partly because there's an anti-hip hop sentiment in Canada’s culture industries, as well as a denial that hip-hop is attractive enough for a mainstream audience and that it would significantly appeal to such a demographic.

How have hip-hop artists in Canada responded to the negativity you describe? It’s impressive that, despite it, they still managed to carve a place for themselves in the country’s broader cultural fabric.

FDC: Yes and to do that they had to find alternative ways to get their work out. One such way has been their establishing an independent market, apart from big record labels and corporations, which some people might think is an indication of hip-hop’s failure to launch in the country. But I actually think we can think about this in different ways that, without speaking for artists themselves, lends itself to a kind of freedom for them to create hip-hop without being tethered to the expectations of consumer capitalism. I can’t say precisely how often that happens but the freedom is there. And with that artists can articulate unpopular truths that don’t necessarily “sell”. They can enlarge the consciousness of audiences, as good educators do.

The US has a long history of acknowledging the power of Black culture and certain business interests have capitalized or profiteered from it. That being said, when hip-hop appears for the first time in the US context it's initially kind of looked at like disco. It's thought of as a fad, that it’ll be short lived. There was also a denial of its creativity and its artistic capacity. A lot of times people thought “this is not art” – a conversation in its own right. But the minute they saw the kind of traction that hip-hop had to cross over into other audiences they immediately tapped into its financial potential, which of course has long driven the culture industries of the US.

A great deal, if not the majority, of hip-hop Canadians listen to and enjoy is produced in America – notwithstanding the growth of the hip-hop industry in Canada and how it's received a lot more attention since Drake, hailing from Toronto, gained international stardom. What do you think accounts for that?

FDC: You’ve got to consider how, in Canada, the US market always looms large. We can't get away from it. And so obviously people in Canada are aware of what's happening in the US and they're seeing the commercial rise of hip-hop, the way that it's being mobilized financially. It’s very curious to me that given this presence of the US market and acknowledging the power of it in Canada, including Canadians themselves consuming American hip-hop at scale, the response of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) is to platform more non hip-hop Canadian artists. Their concern is that if they don’t they’ll be rendered invisible by American culture industries. At the same time the CRTC is denying there’s a market for hip-hop in Canada.

They've used that as an unfair rationale as to why they don't platform Canadian hip-hop artists in greater numbers, why they don't give them the same kind of exposure as they might give to Canadian rock artists. I think that the reason for that is a deep and long history of anti-Blackness in Canada that has yet to be really fleshed out, accounted for, discussed.

How might the way hip-hop is categorized, linguistically and otherwise, play a role in challenging such racism?

FDC: In the Canadian context, those prejudiced against hip-hop won’t call it just that – “hip-hop”. Instead they’ll call it “urban”. It’s a way to obscure the contributions of who's actually taking part in and creating hip-hop, valuable in its own right. It’s also a way, and this is a very Canadian practice, to not directly address or identify what makes Canada special, in this case hip-hop artists themselves and the rich African heritage from which they often draw inspiration. Not only does this make it easier for myths and misunderstandings about hip-hop to go unchallenged. It also prevents greater public understanding, including an awareness of how hip-hop has the potential to educate.

Despite the growing popularity of hip-hop pedagogy and related forms of educational practice, it seems unfortunately that much of the public is completely out of touch with it – to the point that they don’t object or see anything wrong with how, say, the likes of conservatives negatively frame or altogether demean it. To what extent and why does that happen in Canada?

FDC: It does happen in Canada but I think it happens elsewhere too. Generally speaking it’s grounded in misguided views about hip-hop encouraging violence and misogyny, celebrating a kind of gangsterism. This is often accompanied by an entire failure to acknowledge that hip-hop is complex, a plethora of things that include what has moral value. That’s reflected by, say, songs where artists, rapping in impressive detail about a difficult experience they had, present cautionary tales. Admittedly this can include events related to crime but without endorsing it, such as where these stories are designed for youth – hip-hop’s main audience – to see that if they take this or that life route, certain things are bound to transpire in their adult years.

This is a far cry from how hip-hop, unfortunately, is often though falsely regarded. That is, as a vehicle to glorify anti-social or pathological behaviour. I think part of the role that hip-hop pedagogy can play in tackling this is inviting people to decode the messages of hip-hop songs, ascertain the life lessons they hold and how to apply them on both on a personal and societal level. This also honours the call of the hip-hop artist to consider a new or alternative point of view, an unfamiliar dimension of reality – articulated through lyrics – we’d otherwise not see.

Hip-hop teaches in that regard. It’s more than music.