Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity

by Marc Lamont Hill, Gloria Ladson-Billings (Foreword)

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.

Genres: Education, Music, Nonfiction, Research

192 pages, Hardcover

First published April 4, 2009

About the author

Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is one of the leading intellectual voices in the country.

He is currently the host of BET News and VH1 Live, as well as a political contributor for CNN. An award-winning journalist, Dr. Hill has received numerous prestigious awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, GLAAD, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Hill is Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Morehouse College. Prior to that, he held positions at Columbia University and Temple University.
Since his days as a youth in Philadelphia, Dr. Hill has been a social justice activist and organizer. He is a founding board member of My5th, a non-profit organization devoted to educating youth about their legal rights and responsibilities. He is also a board member and organizer of the Philadelphia Student Union. Dr. Hill also works closely with the ACLU Drug Reform Project, focusing on drug informant policy. Over the past few years, he has actively worked on campaigns to end the death penalty and to release numerous political prisoners.
Ebony Magazine has named him one of America’s 100 most influential Black leaders.
Dr. Hill is the author or co-author of four books: the award-winning Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity; The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black life in America; Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on The Vulnerable from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond; and Gentrifier (January 2017). He has also published two edited books: Media, Learning, and Sites of Possibility; and Schooling Hip-Hop: New Directions in Hip-Hop Based Education.
Trained as an anthropologist of education, Dr. Hill holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) from the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the intersections between culture, politics, and education.

Reviews

[Natalee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for a class about using hip hop music and culture to promote literacy and classroom engagement. I valued a lot of this insight Hill provided from his firsthand experience. While I did not agree with every part of his curriculum, I do feel inspired to incorporate aspects of what he did in my future classroom. (Using songs with literary merit during a unit on poetry? Yes please)

[Karin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only reason this got 4 stars was I had a hard time reading this. It was pretty abstract at the beginning. But when it got into the meat of the curriculum, it was much faster. Hill spends a fair amount of time analyzing how he may have changed the research results. But he does it from a place as teacher and young adult and I wish he had also spent more time on the fact that he offered his own "real" by being a man who was also identified by his students as being African American.

In trying to reach my own students, we are all very aware that I am a white woman and can't ever have the kind of social capital with my students that Hill had.

However, I am hopeful that using trauma-informed teaching methods and using hip hop as primary learning media (text, beats, etc) will allow my students to find meaning in my music class. We are in a rural area vs Urban, but my kids still very much identify with the lives of their favorite hip hop artists.

This book was one of the few I have found that had some concrete helps for my building my curriculum.

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

A useful report from the front lines of the battle for literacy. Hill spent a year teaching a Hip Hop Literature course in a "last chance" high school program in Philadelphia. He presents his approach as an adaptation of hip hop culture to the pedagogical situation, and that's the right phrasing to use in relation to his students. From my perspective, most of what he describes that worked is simply good teaching: be aware of your students' frames of reference; listen; respond with an awareness of your own position; use pop culture to develop more conventional skills. The best part of the book is the chapter where Hill provides concrete examples of how the classroom dynamics operated.

Several aspects of the book limit its audience to those with interests in the specific material. I'm sympathetic and I get why he did it this way, but he spends a lot of time orienting his results into academic debates (and using academic vocabularies) that don't add a whole lot to the specifics. I'm not sure why he chose not to use some existing vocabularies from the broader sphere of African American music and culture, choosing to assert a specifically hip-hop vision. For example, his discussion of "co-signing" and "challenging" are essentially versions of dynamics familiar to anyone who knows about "call and response." Almost everything he says about hip-hop echoes motifs present in the blues tradition.

That doesn't diminish the value of Hill's discussions of "authenticity," "silencing" and especially the dynamics of "wounded healing" in the classroom. Important contribution to its academic area.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a hard time getting past Hill's attitude of superiority and privilege over his co-teacher of the class, and my distrust of his attitude negatively colored my reading of the text. His self-promotion and aggrandizing was hard to take, particularly as he positioned himself as the erudite academic in opposition to the "common" English teacher. Further, I wish this book included more specific lesson plans for using hip-hop lyrics as a text in the English classroom.

[Venus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps I relied on the sub heading too much. I was expecting more on the actually pedagogy but instead I got a journal of a teacher in a hip-hop music appreciation class. Perhaps Hill was attempting to be too subjective, perhaps he found himself more indebted to his students, either way it left for a pretty shallow read.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-read for anyone thinking of teaching hip hop in the classroom. The opening and closing bog down significantly in academic language and tedious pedagogy, but the middle part--the meat about lyrics and texts--is worth the read. Tons of great transcripts of in-class interactions with students, ideas for journal response and personal narratives, etc. Fairly quick read as well.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Can be as much problematic as helpful....