Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity by Marc Lamont Hill

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

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  Natalee

  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)
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  Karin

  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

  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.
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  Hannah

  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.
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  Venus

  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

  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

  Can be as much problematic as helpful....