Art Sanctuary offers ‘Hip Hop 101 Guide’

Hip hop and don’t stop

by Decoteau J. Irby

It’s been over 25 years since the Sugarhill Gang first encouraged the American public to hip hop and don’t stop. From its roots in the creative expression of Black and Latino youth in the Bronx, New York, hip hop has since made an undeniable mark on America’s cultural landscape.

In fact, hip hop has started to pop up in schools, and the Philadelphia organization Art Sanctuary has now developed the Hip Hop 101 Curriculum Guide for teachers. The guide, which comprises 10 “learning activities,” a list of academic standards, and background information on hip hop music and culture, is a work in progress. But its developers believe it can help both educators and students appreciate and understand the cultural, artistic, and intellectual merits of hip hop.

Since the early 1990s, scholars and educators have realized hip hop’s potential as a tool for teaching. Catherine T. Powell’s 1991 publication, “Rap Music: An Education with a Beat from the Street” in The Journal of Negro Education, explores how hip hop informally educates youth.

More recently, the concern has been with implementing hip hop education in formal classroom settings. In 2002, a highly regarded English poetry unit, “The Poet in Society” by Ernest Morrell and Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade, solidified the presence of hip hop in the classroom.

The 70-page Hip Hop 101 Curriculum Guide was developed by Laura Smith, a student in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and intern with Art Sanctuary.

The curriculum draws extensively from Art Sanctuary’s existing work that promotes an appreciation of hip hop and provides teacher workshops that focus on ways to incorporate hip hop into the classroom. The guide is unique in that it is designed with the teacher who is uninformed about hip hop in mind.

Lorene Cary, founder and director of Art Sanctuary, explains that the curriculum is “one that could be read and used by teachers who had no personal experience of hip hop forms.... Most teachers have [such experience] of older art forms: symphonies, poems, novels, plays.”

The guide opens with “Eras and Elements of Hip Hop,” an essay by James Peterson, professor of English at Penn State, Abington. This piece orients teachers to the four elements of hip hop: graffiti art, DJing, MCing, and breakdancing. This material also appears as the subject of “Lesson 2: What is Hip Hop?” in which teachers moderate a student debate.

The guide’s learning activities explore hip hop through reading, writing, critical thinking, and discussions. They also provide teachers with a list of suggested readings on hip hop as well as hip hop websites. Lessons vary in their requirements of group work, Internet research, and class discussions.

Each lesson uses hip hop as a lens through which students explore issues ranging from violence (in “Lesson 3: B-Boys and Break Beats”) to race and public space (in “Lesson 5: Reclaiming of Public Spaces”).

While such exploration of hip hop culture and contemporary social issues is important, educators may find it difficult to establish meaningful connections that are aligned with academic standards. Unfortunately, learning goals are not presented with each lesson.

The curriculum is conceptually designed to consider Pennsylvania’s “Academic Standards for Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening,” but the standards and expected outcomes are not consistently made explicit. This significant omission, the major weakness of the curriculum, could leave many educators wondering where the learning is amidst the fun in hip hop education.