Much of the existing Hip-Hop Pedagogy research focuses on the inclusion of Hip-Hop in formal classroom spaces, and the role that Hip-Hop culture plays in the lives of Black and Brown youth specifically. By investigating a Hip-Hop Academy that teaches Hip-Hop culture rather than merely using it as a bridge between academic goals and student realities, this project seeks to add to the existing literature on Hip-Hop Pedagogy in education. Through the use of observations and interviews over the course of a school year, the voices of the participants at the Hip-Hop Academy are placed central and the ways that they conceptualize and navigate their Hip-Hop and Academic identities are explored. This study investigates how students who are being explicitly taught Hip-Hop see the connections between the culture and their academic lives in their own words. The research questions for this study are (1) What is the nature of a space grounded in Hip-Hop culture and constructed through critical theory? (2) What is the nature of student reflection on the world? And (3) What does student participation in spaces like the Hip-Hop Academy reveal about how students want to learn? Through the use of observations, ethnographic field notes, and individual interviews, the voices of the students at the Academy are centered in this study, and the voices of the instructors are incorporated in ways that both answer the research questions, and reveal the ways that the students view their academic and Hip-Hop identities operating in conjunction with one another. The findings reveal that not only does Hip-Hop Pedagogy resonate with student populations that are marginalized, but that it also resonates with some of the most privileged identities in ways that allows all students to recognize and use their voices to express who their multiple identities in ways that are empowering. Furthermore, the students in this study see the skills that they learn through the Hip-Hop Academy as applicable to the other areas of their lives in ways that reveal a student-identified difference between “knowledge” and “education.” The findings of this study reveal that students are not seeing their Hip-Hop goals as in opposition to their academic and career goals, rather they are using the skills that developed through Hip-Hop culture to pursue both Hip-Hop and academic goals simultaneously in ways that compliment each other. This offers implications not only for the power behind honoring student voices through Hip-Hop, but also for how our classrooms and learning spaces can be structured in ways that both make students want to be there and feel comfortable asserting their own voices.
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