Moving as One

This chapter explores how dancing in unison helps Renegades create stronger relationships and a more formidable sense of community. I use my own classroom experiences with my students as a case study in community-focused pedagogy. Building off of research on Broadway chorus lines and military formations/drills, this chapter analyzes the role of unison movement and muscular bonding in making Dubsmash videos. The chapter argues that dancing in unison with students on Dubsmash creates an affective response that helps build stronger relationships between students and teachers. As such, this chapter is a testament as to how Dubsmash can be used as a tool of hip hop education and culturally responsive teaching. To further demonstrate how Renegades materialize in the high school classroom, this chapter also features interviews with other dancing teachers. Dubsmash pushes against the barriers typically seen between teachers and students in public education, effectively becoming a tool of anti-racist community building.

Whoa.Nu: (Re)Constructing and Learning Swedish Hip-Hop Online

Whoa.nu started in 2000 as a community where members discussed all aspects of hip-hop in Sweden. The community became the most important place not only for discussions among members but also for releasing free albums and songs to the public and for arranging events. Moreover, the site was an educational hub for members to learn about hip-hop. The core of Whoa.nu was the community, wherein the communicating environment of members developed as artists, audience, and critics. Whoa.nu was not only a place for individuals’ learning processes and development but a place where Swedish hip-hop evolved and changed its regional frames, forming its own identity. The aim of this article was to present an analysis of the development of Whoa.nu as a learning platform for hip-hop in Sweden based on interviews with the two administrators of the site. Further, we wanted to use this as a steppingstone to discuss how listeners learned about popular music online during different eras. Two questions were at the forefront of this research: (1) How do the interviewees describe the internal views of the relation between how Whoa.nu and Swedish hip-hop changed over 13 years? and (2) how can Whoa.nu be understood as a learning environment? I henceforth present insights into how musical learning can happen outside of institutions and how Swedish hip-hop has grown from subculture to mainstream, which is how Whoa.nu outgrew itself. Hip-hop education is currently institutionalized in the same way that jazz and rock once were institutionalized. It went from being rebellious and subversive to being embraced by the larger society and integrated into academia. The results herein present a story of one example where musical learning in a subculture occurred. The insights presented, then, can help educators prepare for similar transformations of learning arenas in future musical subcultures. These insights could aid teachers and educators to assist students involved in music subcultures not discussed in schools. Hopefully, this article inspires additional ways of learning music.

“Be Current, or You Become the Old Man”: Crossing the Generational Divide in Hip-Hop Education

Hip-hop culture has been an influential force on a large segment of this generation’s teachers and a tool for building relationships with students. The contemporary hip-hop of today’s generation differs from that of many hip-hop educators/pedagogues. This case study explored how one hip-hop generation teacher attempted to cross this generational divide rather than discount youth culture in the classroom. The findings of this study focus on how the teacher’s personal identification with hip-hop culture informed his relationships with students and how he drew from key narratives and ideas in hip-hop to communicate his views of his classroom community.

Hip hop education = informed artist citizens

What follows is a spoken word piece delivered at the Suncoast Music Education Research Symposium in February of 2019 to a group of higher education faculty and doctoral students. It is the intersection of hip hop lyrics and my white privilege, effectively composed as an artistic response to demonstrate the deep knowledge contained within hip hop lyrics and the value gleaned from their critical analyses. The impetus for this piece was my desire to show the conference attendees an alternative to perpetuated and damaging stereotypes about hip hop, a problem which I perceive as the prevalent understanding of hip hop culture and the dominant critique used to oppress this beautiful art form in educational spaces. A caveat about how I chose to sample some of the lyrics is worth mentioning. In some cases, the first-person perspective of the artists, embodied by their use of ‘I’ or ‘we’ in a song, was not appropriate and lyrics were altered to ‘they’ or ‘them’. This choice was to show internal reflection rather than to imply a lived or even co-opted experience by the author. It is important to stress ‘they’ have informed ‘me’. Jvaust as listening to a piece of music would likely be more powerful than studying the score, this piece may best be received by watching the performance.