Copyright by

Delandrea Serita Hall 2021

The Dissertation Committee for Delandrea Serita Hall Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Straight from the Underground: Teachers of Color, Hip Hop, and the Remixing of Social Studies

Committee:

Cinthia S. Salinas, Supervisor

Anthony L. Brown

Joshua Childs

Kristen E. Duncan

Katherina Payne

Amanda E. Vickery Straight from the Underground: Teachers of Color, Hip Hop, and the Remixing of Social Studies

by

Delandrea Serita Hall

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin May 2021 Dedication

I dedicate this dissertation to all my present and former students, and teachers both formal and informal. Each lesson I have learned from all of you has brought me to this point.

Acknowledgements

My dissertation is like the grand finale, the final bow, of my graduate career, and because I like to do things in unconventional ways, I’m going take a different approach to my acknowledgements. I stand on the shoulders of so many people who have gotten me to this place. So, like every great artist/musician/rapper, I’m going step to the mic and shoutout all the people who have supported me on this journey. Additionally, because my dissertation explores Hip Hop, I’m going to compare everyone (mostly everyone) to people who are a part of the culture. Undoubtedly, I will unintentionally leave someone off my list – as all artist accepting awards do; lay any error to my head and not my heart, I promise I will make it up to you when I see you. Now, waving at my supporters as I walk up to the mic, I tap it, “I can’t believe I made it.” Then I begin! First and foremost, I would like to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Stepping out my make-believe acceptance speech for a second, in all seriousness, sometimes I do not think I would have made it through this process without my faith. In fact, I know would not have finished. This rollercoaster is a rough ride and there were many times I wanted off, but then I would hear a gospel song or a sermon with just the right message or someone would tell me they were praying for me, and it was just what I needed to cheer up, refocus, and charge ahead. Returning to my acceptance speech. Second, I would like to thank my participants. You all are the various artists to my DJ Khaled. I may have provided the structure or the beat, but the song at the end of the day reflects all your voices, stories, and knowledge. I learned so much from each conversation or “choppin it up” session, lesson observation, email, and text message. This work is intimately yours as much as mine, and I would not have been able to complete

v this project, during a pandemic no less, without you all. You all amaze me and it was an honor to work with you! Third, I would like to send a special shout to my social studies office buddies and colleagues at UT – Heath, Michael Joseph, Melissa, Joanna, and Daniel. When we were on campus, you all allowed me to barge in your offices, even when you were busy, to bounce ideas off and listen to me rant about things that annoyed me. When we were forced off campus, you all checked in because you knew I was stressed, volunteered to teach my classes, and took over much of the workload. Quirky, talented, fresh, and unique we are a Tanks and The Bangas sort of crew. On an individual note, Daniel thanks for the laughs and walks outside, stay open and true to who you are. Joanna, you may have been one of the last ones in (for me), but you came in with a confidence I wish I had, and you are always so kind. You know yourself and what is important to you and the work you want to do. I admire that so much and I am excited to see what you put out! Melissa, my CUFA roommate and friend, you are always so thoughtful and have the biggest heart. It is a heart that texted me at random moments to let me know I could make it and do anything, and you remind me that it is important to remain human in this process. Thank you for everything and for being open and a wonderful person.

Michael Joseph, who would have thought I would become so close with the guy I thought looked like a wet noodle and Luigi? I know I roast you all the time, but the truth is this last semester, last year, would not have been the same without you. You are funny, laid-back, and hard-working, and you care deeply about people. I am so fortunate to call you friend, and even though you do not think so, I know you will do many great things. Finally, Heath, you are one of the sweetest and considerate people I know. You also are the best listener anyone could ask for. I can talk to you for a long time about anything, including the Cowboys which is hard in this bunch. Having you as an officemate and vi colleague was always so assuring because I knew I never had to worry about being myself. You have a big heart and work so hard, I just hope you start being more kind to yourself, as kind as you are to other people. I know what you can do, and I am excited for your big year in 2022.

Next, I would like to thank my former UT, now outside of UT, crew! Because there are many of you and you all have rooted me, I would say you all are like The Roots to my Questlove. However, that is not quite right so I’m going to rename us Burnt Roots

(get it … burnt orange like UT, and you all root me; it’s not great but go with it) and go in individually adding my own members. Let me start with MJ, one of the coolest people I know much like Pharrell Williams. I remember when I met you when I came to visit and see if I really wanted to return to UT. You told me then I could call anytime, and when I did finally return you offered advice, reminded me to be myself, and never allow the institution to get to me. During the job search process, you also were an ear to talk things through and think about how to approach interviews. Thank you for always reminding me what matters most – being myself and having fun. Neil, you are the other producer in the crew, Timbaland (to my Missy) to be exact. I never would have guessed when I arrived at UT that I would meet someone who way is more into teaching economics than me, but I did and you have taught me so much. You are also one of the kindest and most generous and warmest people I know and my academic partner in crime. I feel so fortunate to work I get to work with you. Thank you for being an awesome human being and bringing me along with you in the writing world; and for allowing me to poke fun and give you a hard time (you are getting good at the comebacks and poking back though), I don’t know what I would do without you! Now for my girls! The ladies of my rag-tag UT crew – Anna, Esther, and Noreen, like if TLC joined the crew. I would have never made it through any of this without you vii all to laugh with and eat with and talk about TV and pop culture. You all inspire and push me in ways I cannot fully articulate. Each of you has played such an important role in who I am in this world, and I know that I am better because of you. Anna, the Southern girl who I felt I’d known forever the first time I met you. You are the Chilli of the group

(curly hair and all), which I realize may sound weird, but hang on I’ll explain. I will never forget the first time I came to your house to babysit Lillian and Atticus and I you opened the door and I met Austin and your house felt so warm and welcoming. Talking to you then, it was like I had known you for a long time before I met you. Not only were you this brilliant person I looked up to in class, but you were also open and kind. So, to me you are like my family away from home, my cool Southern white girl sister who knows all the things both academic and silly/fun. Esther, you are every good thing in the world. You are like a north star that guides and takes care of everyone (as evidenced by your cooking) – in other words, you are our T-Boz. Thank you for always being there for me (for everyone) – to give me advice, to laugh about silly things, to commiserate about work I had to do, to talk about my research and writing, to eat dinner with, and so on. I don’t think I’ll ever meet a better person, and I know I couldn’t have completed this program without you. Last, but certainly not least, Noreen. You are the one who taught us what a caring, hard-working, funny, and brilliant scholar, mentor, and friend looks like in academia. This group is lost without you, you are at its core like Left Eye (who like you also took zero crap). I could never repay you for the mentorship, karaoke/bonding nights, and conversations about music and our love of TV, but I can thank you for your guidance and friendship. Last but certainly not least from my UT bunch, Steven. I had to give you a category of your own because someone whose personality is bigger than life must have their own category. You are my sister from another mister, my ace boon coon, the Kelly viii Rowland to my Beyoncé. We were in this together and this whole experience would have been completely different and “boooorrrring” without you. Besides telling the best stories, coming up with the cleverest quips, and being gut-punching funny, you are also one of the best friends I could ask for. Thank you for keeping me sane throughout this process. Life is a lot more fun with you in it, and I feel blessed to have gotten to know you over the last five years. I promise I’m almost to the end, don’t start playing me off the stage. Before I close, I need to thank my wonderful committee. You hear horror stories about some committees with the dissertation process, but I feel fortunate enough to say I had one of the best committees anyone could ask for. I felt affirmed and encouraged because of the humanizing and warm approach my committee took. Dr. Kristen Duncan, like MC Lyte, you know the landscape of Hip Hop and are so kind, positive, and chill. Talking to you is like talking to an old friend you’ve known forever. I thank you for your mentorship and encouragement. Dr. Anthony Brown, you are the KRS-One of my academic experience.

You know so much and some of my best memories are the times we’d be at meetings and you would drop your infinite knowledge on us. I always enjoyed hearing your stories and laughing at the different craziness we had to meet about. Thank you for being so kind and supportive and making me excited to do this work. Dr. Joshua Childs, while not literally family, you are like family to me. I needed that on my committee, and I was blessed to have you (and you had also done Hip Hop

Education work). Despite all the things going on for you this past year, you made sure to check in with me to see how I was doing and tell me that I could finish this, and always with a tinge of the slight dry sense of humor – in the vein of Tyler the Creator – that makes me laugh. Dr. Katherina Payne, I cannot thank you enough for being one of my biggest academic cheerleaders much like Billie Eilish to Megan the Stallion at the ix Grammys. I would not have even thought to study Hip Hop and social studies if it wasn’t for you, and when I was really struggle with my writing, you picked me up and offered me all the support you could give. Thank you for everything and for being an amazing mentor.

Dr. Amanda Vickery, where do I even begin? I would not be here; I would have never even considered getting a doctorate if it wasn’t for you. I came here because you encouraged me, and you saw something in me that said that I could come back to UT and do this work. Little did I know then that you would change the trajectory of my life in ways I could not conceive when you walked into my classroom years ago. When I see you, I see a queen, Roxanne Shanté, the regal, purposeful, and badass scholar we all aspire to be. I cannot put into words how much I appreciate you and all that you have done to support me. Before I move on to my last committee member, I would also be remiss if I did not thank Dr. Maria Fránquiz, my committee member by proxy. Much like Ivy Queen, you inspire me to bring my authentic self to the field because you do and engage in amazing work. I want to thank you for everything you have done for me. From the guidance and reassurance to the delicious cornbread and the shady laughs, you helped me make it to the finish line. Thank you for nourishing my soul and belly and for being the best non-committee, committee member anyone could ask for! Finally, the one and only Dr. Cinthia Salinas, chair extraordinaire and the Sylvia

Robinson of this whole operation. How do you thank someone for changing the course of your career/life for the better, not once but twice? Before I met you as an undergrad, I was sure I was never going to stick to teaching, and now I can’t imagine doing anything else. You have always believed in me and seen something in me that I couldn’t. You inspire in so many ways, and if I become even half of the mentor, academic, and x generous and caring person you are, I know I will have done something right. I can never repay you or thank you enough for all you’ve done for me and feel extremely blessed to be one the academic seeds you have planted and to have you as a kind of second mom in my life.

Oh no, I hear the playoff music, so I better get ready to exit the stage. But before I do, I have one more group I must thank. My day ones! Melissa, I could not ask for a better best friend. You live life to the fullest and take zero prisoners, and you have been with me through so many life moments I don’t even know where to begin. All I can say is that I thank you being my cheerleader from DeSoto to now, and for reminding me that there is life outside of academia. Priscilla, Mandy, Tonya, Tiffany, Mashundra, and Jasmine, it was like each one of you had special Spidey-senses that knew I needed a word of encouragement, or an outing to take a break, or just to talk to a friend that wasn’t connected to the academic world. Thank you for dinners, games, texts messages, and words of encouragement.

And to my family, for whom I wouldn’t be here, you are my rock. To my parents, my brothers and Ashley, my nephews – Caleb and Canon, my grandmas – Grandma Sue and Doris, my uncles and aunts I want say thank you for checking-in, providing everything I needed, and never doubting I could do finish this. Your love and support sustain me and is the foundation of who I am. Uh oh, they’re coming to usher me off.

One more set of people right quick. To my Hip Hop queens, Cardi B, Rapsody,

Beyoncé, Missy, Erykah Badu, Lauryn, Trina, Megan the Stallion (and I could go on), thank you for hyping me up and inspiring me to write when I didn’t want to. Martin, Gina, Pam, Tommy, and Cole, thank you all for the laughs I needed while writing late at night; and to Oliva Benson, Elliot Stabler, Odafin Tutuola, Munch, Captain Cragen, Dr. xi Huang, Amanda Rollins, Nick Amaro, Dominick Carisi, Rafael Barba, Alex Cabot, and

Casey Novak, thank you for being bad at solving cases and the perfect writing noise companion. And with that, I’m out!!

xii Abstract

Straight from the Underground: Teachers of Color, Hip Hop, and the Remixing of Social Studies

Delandrea Serita Hall, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2021

Supervisor: Cinthia S. Salinas

The curriculum narrative found within the social studies centers the lives, experiences, and positions of middle/upper-class cisgender white men while excluding or silencing the experiences of people who have been historically marginalized. Scholarship regarding Teachers of Color demonstrates the ways these teachers’ pushback against this narrow curriculum. Yet, the practices of social studies Teachers of Color who participate in Hip Hop culture has largely been ignored. This critical qualitative case study examined how five Black and Latina/o(x) teachers utilize Hip Hop music and culture in their classrooms as a disruptive pedagogy in the social studies. Explored through interwoven framework of intersectionality, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP), this study revealed that the teachers’ deep understandings and knowledge of Hip Hop culture, desire to be change agents, context and content intent informed how these teachers incorporated Hip Hop as a disruptive pedagogy. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that the critical Hip Hop praxes (through CHHP) of Black and Latina/o(x) teachers works to disrupt and transform traditional notions of citizenship and the social studies curriculum. xiii Table of Contents

List of Tables ...... xx

List of Illustrations ...... xxi

PART I: THE PROCESS ...... 1

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 2

Study rationale ...... 4

Conceptual framework ...... 7

Overview of the study design ...... 9

Research questions ...... 10

Significance of the study...... 11

Chapter 2: Review of Literature ...... 13

Challenging the Social Studies Curriculum ...... 16

The existing social studies curriculum ...... 18

The curriculum problem ...... 21

Complicating the curriculum ...... 25

Teachers of Color...... 29

Why Teachers of Color ...... 30

What we know ...... 33

Research on Latina/o(x) teachers ...... 37

Research on African American/Black teachers ...... 40

Hip Hop and Citizenship...... 48

Hip Hop in education ...... 51

HHBE and social studies – Part 1 ...... 53 xiv HHBE and social studies – Part 2 ...... 59

Citizenship ...... 62

The dominant citizenship discourses ...... 63

Thinking more critically about citizenship ...... 64

Cultural citizenship ...... 66

Citizenship and Hip Hop ...... 68

Chapter 3: Methodology ...... 71

Introduction ...... 71

Conceptual Framework ...... 73

Critical Race Theory (CRT)...... 74

CRT, education, and social studies ...... 76

CRT methodology ...... 79

Counter-storytelling ...... 81

Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP)...... 85

Intersectionality...... 88

Bringing the framework together ...... 90

Researcher Positionality ...... 91

Qualitative case study research methodology ...... 95

Research design ...... 96

Research context ...... 97

Research participants ...... 98

Recruitment ...... 98

Participant backgrounds/characteristics ...... 99

xv In-Service Teachers ...... 99

T. Brown ...... 99

Megan Pete...... 100

Antonio Ocasio ...... 100

Preservice Teachers ...... 101

Cordae Dunston ...... 101

Destiny Gutiérrez ...... 101

Data collection ...... 102

Interviews ...... 103

Classroom observations ...... 104

Artifacts...... 105

Data analysis ...... 106

Trustworthiness ...... 107

PART II: THE PRODUCT ...... 109

Chapter 4: Why Hip Hop matters in social studies (An ode to Hip Hop): Taking up disruptive pedagogies that center intersectionality and relationality ...... 110

Why Teachers of Color Matter ...... 113

Research on African American/Black teachers ...... 114

Research on Latina/o(x) ...... 116

The official narrative and the consequences of citizenship ...... 118

Theoretical Framework ...... 120

Intersectionality...... 121

Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP)...... 122

Method of Inquiry ...... 124 xvi Research context ...... 125

Participants ...... 126

Researcher positionality ...... 129

Data collection ...... 130

Data analysis ...... 132

An Ode to Hip Hop: Emerging Themes ...... 132

Embodiment ...... 133

Hip Hop Fluency ...... 138

Teachers of Color as “prophets of change” ...... 142

Discussion ...... 144

Hip Hop as intersectional pedagogy ...... 145

Naming ...... 147

Beyond the white gaze ...... 148

Conclusion ...... 150

Chapter 5: The revolution will not be without Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy: Disrupting traditional social studies classes...... 152

Literature Review ...... 155

Black/African American and Latina/o(x) teachers ...... 155

Hip Hop Based Education ...... 159

Conceptual Framework ...... 161

Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) ...... 161

Critical Race Theory (CRT)...... 162

CRT, education, and social studies ...... 164

Countering through counter storytelling ...... 166 xvii Research methods ...... 168

Participants and context ...... 170

Data collection and analysis...... 174

Emerging themes: Hip Hop as a Disruptive Pedagogy in the Social Studies ...... 176

“Sound of the funky drummer/Music hitting ‘the heart’ cause I know you got soul/Brothers and sisters” – Chuck D (2020, intro): Hip Hop for engagement, relevance, mastery and appropriation ...... 177

“They tryna erase our history, stop and think” – YG (2020, verse 5): Hip Hop for transformation ...... 181

Discussion ...... 185

Implications and Conclusion ...... 189

Chapter 6: Recognize the “we”: Examining Hip Hop, civic-ness, and the politics of belonging...... 192

Conceptual Framework ...... 196

The Politics of Recognition and Belonging ...... 196

Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP)...... 198

Method ...... 199

Participants ...... 201

Data Collection ...... 204

Data Analysis ...... 206

Positionality ...... 207

Emerging Themes ...... 209

I am citizen: Hip Hop as a civic narrative of identity ...... 210

My call to action: Hip Hop as a civic narrative of agency ...... 214

I belong: Hip Hop as a civic narrative of membership ...... 218

xviii Discussion ...... 221

Conclusions and Implications ...... 225

Appendices ...... 228

Appendix A ...... 228

Appendix B ...... 229

Interview Protocol ...... 229

Appendix C ...... 233

Whole Copy of “That’s How We Talk” – T. Brown (2020) ...... 233

References ...... 235

xix List of Tables

Table 1: Participants/Contexts ...... 228

xx List of Illustrations

Illustration 1: From Harlem with Love: A Mural Project for Yuri & Malcolm ...... 73 Illustration 2: Zooming in on From Harlem with Love: A Mural Project for Yuri & Malcolm – Malcolm X, Yuri Kochiyama, and their words...... 81

Illustration 3: Painting From Harlem with Love: A Mural Project for Yuri & Malcolm – the local community comes together to help paint the

mural...... 85

Illustration 4: Intersectional zoom in on From Harlem with Love: A Mural Project for Yuri & Malcolm – Yuri Kochiyama, Malcolm X, and Black

Lives Matter protestors...... 88

xxi PART I: THE PROCESS

This dissertation study is broken up into two parts. The first part includes the first three chapters. These chapters include:

1. Outline the significance and rationale of the project. 2. Review all the relevant literature related to the project. 3. Discuss the methods used to conduct this research project.

1

Chapter 1: Introduction

Hip is to know, it’s a form of intelligence. To be hip is to be update and relevant. Hop is a form of movement, you can’t just observe a hop, you gotta hop up and do it. Hip and hop is more than music.

Hip is the Knowledge; hop is the Movement. Hip and Hop is Intelligent Movement. - KRS-ONE

Every school I visit has it and if you listen, you can hear it. It emanates from the speakers of the cars in the front of the school and the headphones of the girl you walk past in the hallway. It is in the cadence of speech from the group of boys gathered in the back of the classroom, and the response to the call from the teacher in the front. It is in every “I got you Miss!” and “No cap!”, and every “boom bap” of the pen upon a student’s desk.

Hip Hop1 is everywhere! It is the J’s, Air Force 1’s, and Harajuku Nike’s on the feet of students and teachers. It is the hoodie, oversized t-shirt, and pants that stop slightly below the waist even when the pants are skinny. It is every extra-long fingernail designed to the max and shaped like a stiletto or coffin. It is every head nod, dap-up, and slow assured walk; and the truth is you do not have to listen or look too hard to find it. It … is

Hip Hop.

A collective culture that emerged from the Bronx, New York in the 1970’s, Hip

Hop is not easily defined as the culture because it “exist[s] as a shared idea” (KRS-ONE,

1 KRS-ONE (2009) notes that we use the term “Hip Hop” to denote “the name of our [(Hiphoppas)] cultural and artistic elements” (p. 63). Since this study is examines the cultural elements, I will use the term “Hip Hop” instead of “Hiphop” or “hip-hop”. Unless spelled/termed differently in direct citation. 2

2009, p. 65). Some define Hip-Hop by its cultural elements – emceeing (MCing), DJing, breaking (b-boys and b-girls), graffiti writing, and knowledge (i.e., overstanding)

(Petchauer, 2009). Others define it in its more complex form – a counter-cultural site

“where [young people] discover and play with the identifications of [themselves], where

[they] are imagined, where [they] are represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not get the message, but to [themselves]” (Hall, 1983, p. 470). Yet, no matter the definition, Hip Hop at its core is about voice (Rose, 1994).

Expressed through music, clothing, language, mannerisms, know-how, and whatever else the community deems is valid, Hip Hop’s voice has become a salient part of each new generation (Hill, 2009), particularly for Black2 and Brown3 folx. It is through this collective voice that young people, and their Hip Hop predecessors who shaped the culture before them, see, name, and make meaning(s) of the world by articulating the civic agency, identity, and membership of groups often forgotten or ignored. In this way,

Hip Hop has become a “critical out-of-school curriculum” (Dimitriadis, 2009, p. XVIII) that emerges from a unique and critical form of pedagogy (Akom, 2009; Love, 2016).

As a curriculum, Hip Hop has much to say about our society and humanity, and our past, present, and future. It would seem, however, that Hip Hop’s curriculum is only located outside of schooling spaces. Again, it would seem. In reality, students and

2 I will use Black and African American interchangeably, sometimes appearing as Black/African American. 3 Brown and Latina/o(x) will be used interchangeably to describe people of Mexican, South American, and Central American ancestry instead of the term Hispanic – a word used to whiten people who may not be read as white and erases indigenous ancestry (see Cruz, 2018) – unless the latter term is used in direct citation. 3

teachers who participate in the culture, perform and embody its curriculum by bringing their “complex Hip Hop sensibilities” with them wherever they go (Love, 2016). This includes schools, classrooms, and the enacted curriculum, which by extension, also includes social studies.

Therefore, it is time to consider the possibilities of a different type of critical curriculum and pedagogy. One that disrupts what we have come to know about what is mainstream and dominant. One that considers the way many young people see and name the world. One that enables voice. It is time to consider Hip Hop.

STUDY RATIONALE For many students, social studies is boring (Loewen 1995/2007). This perception of the subject arises from the ways social studies is taught and what gets emphasized in the curriculum. In many social studies classes, the curriculum amounts to a collection of facts and dates (Loewen 1995/2007; Ross, 2001) constructed to provide an uncomplicated, sanitized, white4 version of history (VanSledright, 2008). Oftentimes presented in the form of a lecture, little critical analysis takes place. In other words, instead of investigating the implications of an America that engaged in two hundred fifty

4 Gotanda (1991) notes that the words “white” and “Black” have been constructed to act in dialectical opposition to each other where the word “Black "summarizes" relations of racial subordination, [and] white "summarizes" racial domination. As a term describing racial domination, "white" is better left in lower case, rather than privileged with a capital letter. "Black," on the other hand, has deep political and social meaning as a liberating term, and, therefore, deserves capitalization” (p. 4). Thus, drawing on this work, I have chosen to lowercase white and capitalize Black, Brown, People of Color, Communities of Color, Teachers of Color, Youth of Color, and Students of Color – racial categories that have been marginalized by what has been defined as white. The only times the word “white” will be capitalized in this paper is in direct citations. 4

years of slavery, ninety years of Jim Crow, sixty years of separate but equal, and thirty- five years of racist housing policy (see Coates, 2014), students are told “all men are created equal” and hard work and responsibility ensure upward social mobility in the form of a house with white picket-fence. Glossed over or disregarded are the histories and lived experiences of People of Color and communities that have been marginalized

(e.g., King, 2014; Rodríguez, 2017; Wills, 2001) by the inequality baked in the structures that ground our society. Ignored are the very examples of our pluralistic democracy that sit in the desks of our classroom.

Peck (2010) notes that “students rely on their identities to help shape their understandings of history, and conversely, we know that they rely on their understandings of history to help shape their identity” (p. 577). Thus, the silencing or erasure of People of Color and those from historically marginalized communities (e.g., the LGBTIA+ community) prevents the important identity work young people do to make sense of the world. Another consequence is that these students dismiss, altogether or partially, the in- school curriculum narratives (e.g., Epstein, 2009; Oto, 2020). This is the product of an

“official” (Apple, 2004) social studies curriculum that acts more as a myth than historical fact (Wineburg, 2009). Thus, students “know but do not believe” the dominant historical narrative and “believe but not know” those narratives that have been silenced (Wertsch,

2000).

Teachers of Color tasked with teaching this curriculum are also keenly aware of the curriculum’s shortcomings (e.g., Salinas & Castro, 2010; Vickery, 2015). While there 5

is much work still to be done regarding the practice of Teachers of Color, particularly in the area of social studies, what is known is that these teachers often reject the constraints of the official or technical curriculum (Cornbleth, 1985) in favor of more critical pedagogical approaches (e.g., Duncan, 2019; Howard, 2004; Magill & Salinas, 2019).

Informed by their lived experiences as raced, classed, and gendered individuals, these teachers employ critical notions of historical thinking/inquiry (e.g., Salinas & Sullivan

2007; Salinas et al., 2016) and citizenship (e.g., Knight, 2011; Rodríguez, 2018). Yet to be explored in a substantive way are the critical pedagogical practices of Teachers of

Color who utlize Hip-Hop Based Education (HHBE) in social studies.

Drawing on a variety of theoretical traditions such as critical pedagogy (Freire,

2000/2010), culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), and counter- storytelling (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001), HHBE utilizes the elements of Hip-

Hop culture in the classroom to “improve student motivation, teach critical media literacy, foster critical consciousness, and transmit disciplinary knowledge” (Hill, 2009, p. 2). In this sense, HHBE is committed to transformative educative work that challenges dominant notions of curriculum and pedagogy. In other words, Hip-Hop culture, the fundamental concept from which HHBE emerges, acts as a disruptive pedagogy.

Mills (1997) defines disruptive pedagogies as,

pedagogical practices which disrupt normalizing discourse[s] in order to provide the space for [what Giroux (1992a) calls] ‘a language of possibility’ (p. 204)[.] … [This] disruption of normalizing discourses enables challenges to be to the legitimacy of schools processes which produce and reproduce oppressive relations of power (pp. 35-36). 6

I argue that disruptive pedagogies in the social studies expose how the problematic nature of the narrative is a deliberate act of racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia.

The act of nuancing, complicating, or countering a narrative so that a more inclusive civic-ness emerges, is a fundamental characterization of disruptive pedagogies. By positioning Hip Hop in social studies, dominant narratives, and the systems that enable them, come undone. And with this new understanding, students can move and speak back to the structures of power.

Scholars have demonstrated HHBE’s critical pedagogical possibilities in literacy

(e.g., Hill, 2006; Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002), science (e.g., Adjapong, 2018;

Emdin, 2011), social justice work (e.g., Stovall, 2013), counseling (e.g., Levy, 2019), and social work (e.g., Travis & Childs, 2018). However, the fields of HHBE and social studies have yet to converge in a significant way. This study seeks to uncover the possibilities of bringing HHBE and social studies together and extend the critical work of social studies Teachers of Color who work in both arenas.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK This research draws on three significant bodies of research that connect via the critical lines of analysis that run through each theory. The first component of this framework is literature regarding Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Delgado & Stefancic,

2017). CRT recognizes the centrality of race and racism. Brought to the field of education, CRT acts as an analytic tool for understanding the inequity that exist in

7

schools (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). For this study, of the five tenets that form the basic perspectives, research methods, and pedagogy of a CRT framework in education

(Solórzano & Bernal, 2001), voice or counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) act as the tool to examine the use of Hip-Hop in social studies classrooms.

The second component of this framework concerns the critical praxis of Critical

Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) outlined by Akom (2009). CHHP brings to together notions of critical pedagogy (Freire, 2000/2010), the inquiry that comes from youth participatory action research (YPAR) (Cammarota, & Fine, 2008; Minkler, 2004), and the basic core tenets of CRT (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001). This instructional framework attempts to construct a transformative curriculum and educative space for marginalized communities through the use of Hip-Hop’s cultural practices. To these ends, CHHP provides an avenue by which to bring Hip-Hop culture into the classroom in a critical way.

The final component of this conceptual framework comes from the literature on intersectionality. Intersectionality describes the interconnected and overlapping nature of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other points of difference (Crenshaw, 1989). It was through the racial analysis of CRT that Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) thrust intersectionality into the field of education as an analytical framework. As a tool of an analysis and resistance (Crenshaw, 1991), “at its best, intersectionality is the ability to name racism even while acknowledging that racism is not the only culprit in a particular crime” (Harris & Leonardo, 2018, p. 16). Thus, intersectionality acts to mark the 8

inequality in schools as not only a product of racism but also a product of other social experiences and conditions.

Bound together by issues of race, marginalization, resistance, and voice, the convergence of these ideas constructs a lens from which to analyze the data. Specifically, this framework addresses the ways Teachers of Color implement and practice disruptive pedagogies, in this case Hip Hop music and culture, to construct a fuller, more complex narrative in social studies.

OVERVIEW OF THE STUDY DESIGN This study utilizes a critical qualitative case study design (Merriam, 2014;

Thomas, 2016) to explore the ways Teachers of Color illuminate power and uproot/challenge narratives within the social studies curriculum through the disruptive pedagogical practice of HHBE. Thomas (2016) defines case study as an “analyses of persons, events, decisions, periods, projects, policies, institutions or other systems which are studied holistically” (p. 23). The goal of critical research is “to critique and challenge, to transform and empower” (p. 34). As a critical researcher, who engages in Black feminist qualitative inquiry, it also is important to acknowledge that my critiques are shaped by my personal and shared experiences, and the work I do in collaboration with my participants should “breathe life into the study of society and culture” (Evans-Winter,

2019, p. 21). Furthermore, it is important to be cognizant of the words used to describe the community and those being researched. Mindful of my positionality in relation to my

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participants I practiced reflexivity throughout the research process. The five purposefully selected (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) preservice and in-service teachers who make up this case study work at five different campuses, in four different districts, in and around large urban spaces in a Southwestern state. These participants were purposefully selected based on their deliberate decisions to use Hip Hop in the classroom.

Data consisted of three semi-structured digitally recorded interviews, classroom observations, student work (provided by the participant), and participant-generated artifacts. Additionally, “everyday taken-for-granted images, symbols, artifacts, gestures, and languages serve as [data]” (Evan-Winters, 2019, p. 25). Thus, any observations made from these kinds of noninstitutionalized texts acted as data. Using my conceptual framework as a lens, this data was then coded and analyzed for emerging themes using the analytic software Dedoose.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS This study addressed the following three research questions:

1. Why do Teachers of Color take up Hip Hop culture in their social studies

classrooms?

2. How do Teachers of Color use Hip Hop culture in social studies

classrooms?

3. How does Hip Hop music and culture act as a pedagogical tool that

disrupts dominant notions of citizenship and social studies education?

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This study sought to examine the practices of Teachers of Color, specifically

Black and Latina/o(x)5 teachers, and their use of Hip Hop culture as a disruptive pedagogical praxis in social studies, addressing gaps in the social studies and HHBE literature.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY This dissertation attended to three aspects of HHBE in Social Studies. First, I aimed to richly depict the voices, experiences, and knowledge of social studies Teachers of Color (e.g., Duncan, 2019; Rodríguez, 2019; Salinas & Blevins, 2013; Vickery, 2016) and render their teaching praxis visible. Second, I contend that social studies classrooms must address the racist (Stanley & Longwell, 2004; Tyson, 2003), classist (Lucey &

Laney, 2009, Shanks, 2018), sexist (Winslow, 2013), and homophobic (Schmidt, 2010;

Mayo, 2010) narratives that exist within the curriculum. These narratives produce another, more dangerous one – that the civic identity, agency, and membership of marginalized peoples are inconsequential to the larger American narrative and undeserving of being heard. This narrative is one the field must challenge, and one way to do so is through disruptive pedagogies. For this study, Hip Hop acts as the disruptive

5 For this study I will use the term Latina/o(x) instead of the commonly used terms Latina/o or Latinx. Marquéz (2018) notes that the term Latinx denotes “a political identity that centers the lived experiences of queer, non-binary, gender non-conforming/creative and/or trans* individuals” (para. 3). While most people use the term to be gender inclusive, “used this way, “Latinx” is mainly a placeholder to describe those that identify as part of the “Latina/o,” “Latino” or “Hispanic” community, instead of including an interrogation of race, queerness and gender identity” (para. 5). Thus, to be more intentional in my use of the word Latinx, so to forefront queer and non-gender conforming identities and experiences, I will only use the terms Latinx when a person identifies themselves as Latinx or in direct citation. I will also use Latina/o when people identify as such, and to be more gender inclusive, I will instead use Latina/o(x). 11

pedagogy. Hip Hop culture via HHBE offers a critical and transformative way to interrogate and challenge social studies education.

That is because Hip Hop is a collective conscious. Hip Hop is how we heal ourselves. Hip is something you live! – KRS-ONE

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Chapter 2: Review of Literature

Yeah, I pay taxes, so much taxes, shit don't make sense Where do my dollars go? You see lately, I ain't been convinced I guess they say my dollars supposed to build roads and schools But my niggas barely graduate, they ain't got the tools Maybe 'cause the tax dollars that I make sure I send Get spent hirin' some teachers that don't look like them And the curriculum be tricking them, them dollars I spend Got us learning about the heroes with the whitest of skin One thing about the men that's controlling the pen That write history, they always seem to white-out they sins …

- “Brackets”, J. Cole (2018, track 8)

As Cole (2018) raps, there exists a constant tug-of-war within education to control the narratives and purposes of the school curriculum (Anderson, 1988; Banks, 1993;

Bennett & LeCompte, 1990; Ross, 2001; Tyack, 1974). In what is essentially a struggle between “cultur[al] visions and differential power” (Apple, 1992, p. 7), the winners of this battle have garnered the ability to devise the narrative present within schools and govern the voices that are allowed to reverberate throughout the curriculum (Trouillot,

1995/2015). In light of this power, the perpetual victors – white, middle/upper-class, heterosexual, cisgender men – have constructed a curriculum that, according Hip-Hop artist J. Cole, is centered around “heroes with the whitest of skin” who “always seem to white-out they sins” [emphasis added] (2018, track 8). In other words, “the men that's controlling the pen” [emphasis added] (Cole, 2018, track 8) have mandated a curriculum discourse seeped in notions of Whiteness (Harris, 1993; Leonardo, 2009) which has created a singular narrative within social studies.

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Whiteness is a product of white investment in continued racial supremacy (Harris,

1993) that presents itself in schools through the official and hidden curriculum (Apple,

2004) often in unremarkable ways. From the overwhelming numbers of white teachers in the workforce (NCES, 2018) – an unremarkable hidden curriculum – to the textbooks, curriculum resources, and state-standards – the official curriculum – that exclude or distort the narratives of People of Color (Loewen, 1995/2007; Wills, 2001), women

(Levstik & Groth, 2002; Schmidt, 2012), and members of the LGBTQ community (Brant

& Tyson, 2016; Camicia & Zhu, 2019), Whiteness has become the foundation for much of the dialogue around schooling. As a result, the schooling curriculum continues to perpetuate white supremacy by rendering the people excluded from the privileges of

Whiteness invisible (Ladson-Billings, 2003; Swartz, 1992).

To put it differently, “white supremacy creates … the expectation that issues of concern to [white people] will be central to every discourse” (Grillo & Wildman, 2013).

Consequently, Students of Color, a large and growing number of the public-school population (NCES, 2018) and victims of this normalized discourse, experience a

“curriculum [that] be tricking them”; one that is reinforced by teachers who attend to the traditional tropes outlined in narrowed mandated curriculum standards and high stakes testing (McNeil, 2000; McNeil & Valenzuela, 2001; Valenzuela, 2005). The resulting school narrative tells Students of Color, as well as students from other communities that have been marginalized, that their stories and experiences are insignificant (Wills, 2001).

Particularly, it tells these students that their civic identity, agency, and membership can 14

be defined narrowly, glossed over or ignored, and/or is nonexistent (Busey & Walker,

2017; Rodríguez & Ip, 2018; Salinas et al., 2015; Brant & Tyson, 2015; Shear, 2015).

This type of neglect acts as a sort of curriculum violence (Ighodaro & Wiggan, 2011) because, as Jones (2020) argues, omitting our student’s histories from the curriculum “or teaching [them] in ways that are irresponsible is violent[,] … [and] it harms how … students learn history and see themselves in it” (para. 10). In other words, the technical curriculum (Cornbleth, 1985) becomes a tool of violence or trauma when students are unable to locate their place in the larger historical, geographic, and economic narrative, or when teachers engage in harmful pedagogical practices (e.g., role play involving the institution of slavery).

Thus, if schools and the field of social studies are to be more inclusive and reflective of the dynamic nature of our pluralistic democracy, schools and research must consider the practices and ways of knowing of People of Color, both students and teachers (Bermudez, 2012). Additionally, the curriculum must incorporate other histories and experiences to build a more truthful narrative (e.g., Anderson, 2013; Dunbar-Ortiz,

2014; Levy, 2014; Rodríguez, 2018; Salinas et al., 2012; Woodson, 2017). This study seeks to profile the possibilities of a more holistic and inclusive curriculum narrative by exploring how Teachers of Color work to break the continuing drum beat of the social studies curriculum through their understanding, identification, and work with Hip Hop culture (Chang, 2005; Dimitriadis, 2009; Rose, 1994).

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This review of literature examines scholarship and related concepts important to a discussion of social studies education, Teachers of Color, Hip Hop Based Education

(HHBE) and citizenship. First, I provide an overview of literature concerning the construction and purpose of the social studies curriculum and consider the ways the resulting narrative has come to exclude the civic histories of teachers and Students of

Color. Second, I examine the broader research on Teachers of Color eventually moving to focus specifically on critical Teachers of Color, their epistemological understandings, and their disruptive pedagogical (Mills, 1997) approaches to teaching social studies.

Third, I delve into the scholarship on Hip-Hop Based Education (HHBE) (Hill &

Petchauer, 2013) and citizenship while considering the ways notions of citizenship manifest within Hip Hop Based Education. I conclude by addressing the concerns and gaps within the literature and outlining the need and possibilities for continued work on

Teachers of Color, Hip Hop Based Education, and citizenship and the social studies in order to push the field forward to generate a more meaningful use for J. Cole’s tax dollars.

CHALLENGING THE SOCIAL STUDIES CURRICULUM “Got us learning about the heroes with the whitest of skin”

As a field, the Social Studies encompasses a large umbrella of social sciences with disciplines ranging from history, geography, civics and economics to sociology, psychology, anthropology, and political science (Stanley, 2001). No matter the content –

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whether the focus is to understand the structure and powers of government or the consumption choices of consumers – at its core, social studies examines the “social nature of mankind [and]…what it means to be human” (Jorgensen, 2014, p. 3). Thus, if

Social Studies is an examination of humanity and social interactions, it would follow that the curriculum would work towards this end. It would also mean that the curriculum would have to work to tell the diverse and complicated stories of all people within our pluralistic democracy. Yet, who and what is to be included in the curriculum has been highly debated since the subject’s introduction into public school spaces (Cornbleth,

1985; VanSledright, 2008).

Research has also shown that social studies education has often failed to be wide- ranging and humanizing (Magill & Salinas, 2019). In fact, the lack of inclusivity within the dominant narrative of social studies (Chandler & McKnight, 2009) acts to dehumanize people who are not white, male, and middle/upper-class (Vickery, 2019).

With no avenue to the histories and lived experiences of “others” within the curriculum, women are normalized and constrained to notions of white womanhood that do not recognize the many ways women come to live in and know the world (Schmidt, 2012;

Colley, 2019). For instance, women of color who have made significant contributions to our democracy are equally diminished if not omitted (Vickery, 2014, 2017a).

Additionally, by reducing economic policy and thought to quantitative graphics and data, issues of economic inequality and justice are reduced to individual failures (Adams,

2019). And, critical voices of the LBGTQ community are cast under the lens of 17

heteronormativity or homophobia (Camicia, 2016; Sheppard & Mayo, 2013). The challenge and consequence for social studies educators is to acknowledge the humanity that may emerge from the curricula and to further reveal the intricate and powerful nature of intersectionality (Collins & Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1989; Salinas et al., 2016;

Vickery, 2018) that explains human complexity.

Ultimately, this section aims to detail the ways in which social studies educators and curriculum work to tell the story of who matters in America as “mattering, citizenship, community sovereignty, and humanity go hand in hand with the ideas of democracy, liberty, and justice” (Love, 2019, p. 2). The following sub-sections will explore the dominant narrative found within the existing curriculum, the doubts created from that curriculum, and the challenges to, and implications of, a curriculum of marginality.

The existing social studies curriculum The field of Social Studies Education (SSE) is charged with preparing a diverse citizenry for participation in civic life by helping students become familiar with

American ideals and the nation’s national identity (VanSledright, 2008). The social studies curriculum “in this sense … is about memory making, or the way a nation imagines [itself] and shapes what people come to know about the past and present”

(Brown & Brown, 2015, p. 104). Presented through idealized story of celebratory myths, heroic actors, holidays, and national progress (Cohn, 2008; Loewen, 2007; Wineburg et

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al., 2008), the field of social studies offers narratives that conjure up for the American imagination notions of “a shining city on hill”, melting pots6 where all immigrants are welcome, and an American Dream7 within reach for everyone who arrives on her shores.

Thus, “social studies as a subject was born to embrace society’s customs and traditions while at the same time cohesively absorbing competing influences” (Jorgensen, 2014, p.

6) and define what it meant/means to be American (Westheimer, 2006).

Furthermore, in doing the work of constructing a national or “American” identity, the field of social studies also does the work of nation-building. Tyack’s (1974) research illuminates how the common school movement, particularly in urban spaces, was built upon the social and political belief that schools could work to build a common national identity by blurring cultural differences amongst communities, “Americanizing” immigrants, and creating “proper” citizens. By extension, Social Studies Education

(SSE), in its role as an agent of citizenship instruction, was built premised on the belief that the field would act as one of the instruments for nation-building. Trouillot

6 The mythical notion of America as a “melting pot” emerged during the early 20th century following the production of play by the same name. Throughout the play, Zangwill, the plays writer, suggests that “through association and intermarriage … immigrants shed their past modes of being as ethnics of a different land” (Smith, 2012, p. 390). This narrative ignores the structural disparity between racial, ethnic, and religious groups which results in a one-way assimilation where minority communities are expected to give up their traditions and culture to conform to white/dominant culture (Booth, 1998; Smith, 2012). 7 Coined in 1931, the American Dream was, and continues to be, an idyllic and mythical notion of America (Wyatt-Nichol, 2011) as: A land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement ... a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. (Adams, 1931, p. 404)

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(1995/2005) noted that the hands and minds behind the nation-building mechanism of social studies have had the fundamental power to define the American narrative. This power has commonly resided with white, middle/upper-class, heterosexual men, and as a result, the dominant narrative that guides social studies submits

the United States as [a] nation-state … founded on such ideals as justice before the law; one person, one vote; and a panoply of rights for individual citizens and propertied interests, [where] those ideals sometimes have been abdicated to serve the interests of maintaining the nation-state itself. (VanSledright, 2008, p. 3)

Thus, in its attempt to craft a narrative of national “we-ness” the curriculum “usually follows the work of the powerful and leaves the powerless invisible and unexamined … often [by] cover[ing] up or steriliz[ing] national disgraces in an effort to produce patriotic citizens” (Nelson & Pang, 2014, p. 217). This produces a historical process and narrative that is frequently divergent and fragmented, and always seeking to tell a complete story arc – beginning/exposition, middle/climax, and end/resolution – absent uncertainty or a tragic end (Lévesque, 2008; Trouillot, 1995/2015). This is why the Civil Rights

Movement gets reduced to bigger than life heroes, alongside a few heroines, who stand up in the face of injustice to achieve racial progress (Anderson, 2013; Hall, 2005;

Theoharis, 2018), and stories of immigration became about the welcoming words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty and “immigrants who made supergood” in the name of

American exceptionalism (Loewen, 1995/2007, p. 213).

In other words, in order to maintain the interest of the nation-state, the master narrative – “a conspiracy of myth, history, and chauvinism [that] served to create an

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ideology as the dominating historical motif against which all history would resonate”

(Huggins, 1991, p. 25) – has built a narrative that works to “sustain[] our collective sense of national purpose and identity, and [echo] our most compelling myths” (p. 27). This discourse was then codified within the official standards and delivered through the social studies curriculum. No matter a student’s or educator’s background, they were asked to make sense of American ideological principles based on the curriculum values of white, middle/upper-class, cisgender men. As the dominant lens that guides the narrative and what means to be a citizen, crafting a curriculum centered around Whiteness meant losing sight of the humanity of those members of the American community who have been marginalized (Heilig et al., 2012; Ladson-Billings, 2003; Loewen, 2007; Nelson & Pang,

2014; Zinn, 2003).

The curriculum problem The National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) standards, the professional organization for social studies educators, in their executive summary called for “the promotion of civic competence – the knowledge, intellectual processes, and democratic dispositions required of students to be active and engaged participants in public life”

(NCSS, 2010). The terms “active” and “engaged”, however, were wrapped-up in notions of Whiteness which became the standard framework for civic education (Tyson & Park,

2008). For a multiethnic and racial society with people of varying religious, economic and arrival backgrounds, this white centric narrative ignores the pluralistic nature of

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American democracy, and marginalizes the civic stories (Martell & Stevens, 2017), knowledge, and understandings of people who do not identify with the official curriculum narrative (Cornbleth, 1997; Parker, 2006; Almarza & Fehn, 1998). Herein lies the problem with the social studies curriculum. It assumes a universal notion of citizenship and “Americanism”, and for teachers and students who live at the intersections (Collins, 2009; Crenshaw, 1989) of race, class, gender, and sexuality, this narrative meant to unify constructs a disjointed, illusory notion of America.

Epstein’s (2009) seminal work revealed that the absence of Black students’ interpretative frameworks of history, which were influenced by what they had learned at home and through Black-oriented institutions, fostered “a range of critical interpretations of race and rights in national history and society” (p. 107). These Black students understood the dominant curricular narrative, as they had heard it many times, but because their narrative frameworks were never attended to, they viewed the lack of Black narratives in the textbooks and in their teachers’ instructional practices as evidence of a

“false” history being transmitted within the classroom (Wertsch, 2000). Seixas’s (1993) study of a multicultural, urban secondary school in Canada found that students’ understanding of history was impacted by their families lived experiences and other resources which put in doubt historical facts presented in class. Research by Vickery

(2015, 2017b) and Johnson (2019), Rodríguez (2018), Rains (2003), and Salinas and

Blevins (2013) revealed the ways Black women and men, Asian Americans, Indigenous,

Latina and Latino educators, respectively, utilized their lived experiences and the 22

personal narratives to disrupt the official curriculum and unmask the voices of People of

Color. These scholars advanced the more critical notions of citizenship that existed within the communities they worked which were not found within the traditional social studies curriculum.

This growing body of work calls into question whether citizenship education can truly transmit an inclusive national identity particularly when the social studies curriculum offers exclusionary and incomplete historical, geographic, and economic narratives. Moreover, this work also speaks to Wertsch’s (2000) ideas of “knowing but not believing” and “believing but not knowing” – the notion that belief and knowledge in history centers around the fact that while people may be able “produce a version of the official narrative almost automatically, and … employ it with great facility”, if they have knowledge of an alternative account, they may reject or resist the official curriculum (p.

39). Students and educators from communities that have been traditionally marginalized often reject and/or reframe the traditional narrative within social studies because it lacks nuance beyond the goals of Whiteness (Brown & Au, 2014). As a result, many

Americans are unable to coalesce around the prevailing civic discourse of what it means to be an active and engaged citizen (e.g., Jaffee, 2016; Knight, 2011; Urrieta, 2004).

Another problem with the official curriculum is that it becomes a part of a larger

“normalizing discourse” around race (Brown & Brown, 2015, p. 104). Scholarship notes that the implicit and explicit racism that exists within the social studies standards, curriculum, textbooks and other curricular resources plays a role in the stereotyping, 23

erasure and the lack of critical consciousness regarding issues of race and while also reifying discursive ideas regarding People of Color racism (e.g., Calderon, 2014; King,

2014; Ladson-Billings, 2003; Rodríguez, 2017; Salinas et al., 2016; Tyson, 2001). Yet, this normalization not only occurs around the contours of race. Narratives around gender communicate that the nation is rooted in masculinity (Levstik & Groth, 2002; Winslow,

2013). Classist and meritocratic notions of the economy imply a lack of structural/systemic issues (King & Finley, 2015; Shanks, 2017). Heteronormativity and homophobia within the curriculum continue to define LGBTQ community as abnormal

(Camicia, 2017; Loutzenheiser, 2003). In other words, the official curriculum plays into cliched ideas about People of Color, women, economic resources and labor, and the

LGBTQIA+ community.

Furthermore, by excluding, distorting, diluting, and silencing the narratives of

People of Color, women, the LGBTQIA+ community, and people who are most affected by an unequal economic system, the social studies curriculum tells a story about who matters most in this country while oversimplifying our understanding and/or dismissing everyone else (e.g., Howard, 2004). Mattering speaks to the humanity available to people within society, and as Love (2019) explains “mattering, citizenship, community sovereignty, and humanity go hand in hand with the ideas of democracy, liberty, and justice for all, which are the unalienable rights needed to thrive” (p. 2). Thus, the problem with a social studies curriculum narrative that predominately centers the voices middle/upper-class white, heterosexual men is that it communicates that humanity and 24

the right to thrive in America are only available to them, and the civic power, agency and contributions of people considered “civic others” is trivial.

Complicating the curriculum Whether it is through data and primary sources (Brown & Drake, 2003), or the stories told at home that arise in the classroom (Levy, 2014), Social Studies can construct a kind of truth. This truth enables us to sketch a cultural, political, geographical, and economic picture of America and the world, and define what it means to be “citizen”. As evidenced in the prior section, the problem with the traditional social studies curriculum and citizenship education is that the subsequent picture drafts a partial and/or singular image which results in negative consequences for communities that have been marginalized (Parker, 2003). As a result, research has examined ways to nuance or complicate the official narrative in order to craft a richer portrait. This growing research has focused on three areas: (a) historical thinking/inquiry; (b) counternarratives/counter- storytelling; and (c) teacher preparation.

Students make sense of historical narratives through their experiences with the different social, political, and economic texts they encounter in the world (Freire, 1985;

VanSledright & Kelly, 1998). This means that students’ historical understandings hinge upon the reconciliation of their experiential/epistemological knowledge and their understandings of the historical narratives presented to them. Simply put, the social studies curriculum asks students to examine historical evidence objectively, while taking

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textbooks and sanctioned resources as fact even in the face of their own lived experiences. As result, students must traverse strange and unfamiliar cognitive terrain to understand the past, recognize different perspectives, and make sense of their present

(Wineburg, 2001). Historical inquiry aids students in making the trek across this landscape.

Historical thinking/inquiry8 utilizes the disciplinary approach of historians – the analysis of primary sources or first-hand accounts – to investigate the past so that school history becomes “a place to explore the cognitive processes we use to discern pattern and significance in the past” (Wineburg, 1991, p. 518). Yet, “versions of the national past

[can] conflict with the official history and too often lead to deep-rooted divisions and even conflicts between group” particularly in multi-cultural and national societies

(Lévesque, 2008, p. 61). In other words, historical inquiry does not guarantee a more nuanced construction and understanding of historical events and figures, nor does it guarantee that students will accept historical narratives (e.g., Seixas, 1993). Critical historical thinking, on the other hand, works to render a more inclusive narrative that is mindful of whose knowledge is privileged in history.

Salinas et al. (2012) define critical historical thinking as an examination of primary sources that includes “multiple perspectives and/or challenge[s] traditional metanarratives … [introducing] the other [to] disrupt[] the official curricula typical to the

8 I will use historical thinking and historical inquiry interchangeably here and depending on the terminology used by each scholar cited. 26

teaching of history” (p. 18). When done utilizing multiple perspectives (i.e., the perspectives of populations who have traditionally be marginalized) and complex, unresolved historical narratives, students are able to engage in critical thinking, problem- posing education, reflective skepticism, multi-perspectivity, and systemic thinking

(Bermudez, 2014) to upend linear and essentialized narratives of progress and allow for

“multiple nuanced interpretations” of history (Santiago, 2019, p. 114). Furthermore, by exposing the fact that “sources all bear perspectives and that perspectives can be legitimate and still differ” (VanSledright, 2010, p. 118), historical inquiry/thinking works to unsettle the schematic narrative templates (Wertsch, 2008) students hold by providing them with “conceptual tools” to move them “from a usable past to usable and [emphasis added] historical past” (Wills, 2011, p. 141). Thus, the process of critical historical inquiry allows students to construct a new discourse while also working to disrupt the master narrative found in social studies.

Counternarratives are an example of the type of narratives that can be created through critical historical thinking. Unlike the official, null, and implicit narrative that dominates the social studies curriculum (Parker, 2010), “counternarratives provide a broader understanding of historical events that strengthen subject matter content yet also disrupt dominant narratives that are narrow, inaccurate, and harmful to People of Color”

(Navarro & Howard, 2017, p. 219). These narratives may also incorporate counter-stories

“which challenge the received [traditional] wisdom” (Delgado, 1989, p. 2414) by enabling communities that have traditionally been marginalized to relay their lived 27

experience and realities, an important “first step on the road to justice” (Ladson-Billings

& Tate, 1995, p. 58). Thus, when historical narratives are intentionally constructed to center sources of knowledge outside of the official curriculum, “reveal[ing] the ‘isms’

[and ‘phobias’] and…the agency of Communities of Color and women” (Salinas et al.,

2016, p. 16), the dominant discourse within social studies begins to unravel. When teachers fail to take up counter/resistant storytelling, the dominant narrative within the official curriculum wins out “which translates into a diminished form of democracy”

(McKnight & Chandler, 2009, p. 72). To put it differently, counter-narration opens an avenue of possibilities aimed at a more liberatory civic education.

At the same time, the narratives teachers decide to present in class are influenced by their epistemic schemas which are molded through their experiences with, and knowledge about, race, class, gender, and sexuality (Salinas & Sullivan, 2007). Informed by these various ways of knowing, when preservice teachers lack the understanding and awareness to act in transformative (e.g., Crowley & Smith, 2015; Sleeter, 2001), socially just (Picower, 2012; Boyles et al., 2009) and anti-racist (King & Chandler, 2016) ways, issues around race (Brown, 2011; Howard, 2004), class (Neumann, 2015; Shanks, 2018), gender (Sleeter & Grant, 1996; Vickery, 2018), and sexuality (Dykes & Delport, 2018) fail to be addressed in the classroom. These narratives help students, particularly those from marginalized communities, make sense of their historic and current civic identity, agency, and membership. Deprived of these narratives, these students are positioned as

“other” and their knowledge and experiences are deemed unimportant. 28

As a result, scholarship has called upon teacher educators to do the work of filling in these knowledge gaps (Salinas & Blevins, 2013), so that preservice teachers become familiar with the task of countering the “official knowledge” (Apple, 2000) found within the social studies curriculum. For instance, after introducing the African American history curriculum, A Winding River, to preservice teachers who lacked familiarity with much of the narrative, King (2014) concluded that “too many social studies teachers enter the profession without the necessary knowledge to explicitly challenge the official curriculum and present a nuanced understanding about African-Americans as well as other historically marginalized groups” (p. 448). Teachers do not know what they do not know. This work calls upon teacher education programs to provide pathways to obtain the knowledge needed to complicate the traditional narrative.

Without the knowledge of unofficial, invisible, or silent narratives (Wills, 1996), teachers are unable to attend to the histories and knowledge of students who sit in the classrooms from communities that have been marginalized. However, once non-dominant narratives are introduced, recognized, and understood, flipping the narrative script through counter-storytelling and inquiry offers a way from these same teachers to challenge and reframe the dominant narratives expressed within the curricula, which is needed in Social Studies Education (SSE) to develop our pluralistic democracy.

TEACHERS OF COLOR “Get spent hirin' some teachers that don't look like them”

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The growing number of Students of Color in schools (NCES, 2017) has led to increased calls for a teacher workforce that is more reflective of the student population served, particularly in public schools. Simultaneously, the discourse within the research that has demonstrated the benefits in hiring (Villegas & Irvine, 2010), recruiting (Villegas

& Davis, 2008; Villegas & Lucas, 2004), and retaining (Achinstein & Ogawa, 2012)

Teachers of Color. This work has predominantly attended to African American/Black

(Brown, 2009; Foster, 1993; Irvine, 1989) and Latina/o(x) teachers (Gomez et al., 2008;

Monzó & Rueda, 2001; Ochoa, 2007), with little attention directed toward Indigenous

(Strong-Wilson, 2007) and Asian American teachers (Goodwin et al., 2006; Rodríguez,

2018). Given the purposefully selected teachers in this project, it is important to explore what is generally known about the Teachers of Color and their practices, with specific focus on African American/Black and Latina/o(x) teachers. In the following subsections,

I will discuss the research regarding the need for Teachers of Color and what we know about their practices. Then I will look at the literature regarding Latina/o(x) and African

American/Black teachers, as this study attends specifically to their practices.

Why Teachers of Color The calls for more Teachers of Color are supported by a body literature that shows the benefits of racial pairing in the classroom and the vital role Teachers of Color play in the communities they serve (Easton-Brooks, 2014; Quiocho & Rios, 2000; Ríos &

Montecinos, 1999). In a metanalysis of multiple studies, Villegas and Davis (2008), for

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instance, find at least four significant rationales for studying and developing the teacher of color corps. First, unlike their white counterparts, Teachers of Color often maintain high expectations for Students of Color. These expectations are in defiance of deficit framing that provides Students of Color with few options and opportunities (Fránquiz et al., 2011; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Villegas & Geist, 2008). Second, the result of these higher expectations, coupled with more culturally relevant pedagogies, are increased student academic outcomes (Egalite, Kisida, & Brown, 2015; Villegas & Davis, 2008).

For example, a recent study from Gershenson et al. (2018) found that the benefits of demographic pairing between teachers and students was not only limited to short-run effects but also long-run outcomes because when Black students had a least one Black teacher in school it increased their long-run educational outcomes. This ability to increase the academic achievement of Students of Color also garnered more trust among principals and parents which also led to positive non-academic effects on Students of

Color. Finally, research has shown Teachers of Color often act as role models for

Students of Color and work in ways that help stem “second generation school discrimination” (Meier et al., 1985; Noguera, 2006) by utilizing “their cultural knowledge to help Students of Color build bridges to learning[,] and … establish[ing] relationships of care and trust with their students” (Villegas & Davis, 2008, p. 600). In other words, because Students of Color often find themselves in schooling spaces with unwelcoming teachers (Macedo & Bartolomé, 1999), the lack of Teachers of Color in the teaching workforce acts as form of discrimination. These teachers often invest in the needs and 31

education of their Students of Color in way that works to upset a schooling structure that marginalizes Students of Color (e.g., Banks, 1998; Dilworth, 1992; Villegas & Lucas,

2004).

Additionally, scholars have located splinters between the dominant ideologies that prevail in schools and the home and cultural knowledge of many students, particularly

Students of Color (e.g., Guitérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Moll et al., 1992). As a result, theories arose around the need for culturally responsive (Gay, 2000), relevant (Ladson-Billings,

1995), and sustaining pedagogies (Paris, 2012), and educational practices that valued communities through cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005). These theories suggest that Students of Color carry a tapestry of rich ways of seeing and knowing the world that must be acknowledged and nurtured in schools. This means that “meeting the instructional and personal needs of diverse learners demands teachers who are diverse themselves and who can create more inclusive classroom cultures that embrace multiple ways of knowing”

(Goodwin & McIntosh, 2008, p. 25).

Finally, within schools there exists a “democratic imperative” (Haycock, 2001) that speaks to the need for more Teachers of Color in schools. This notion claims that the educational system fails to serve the needs of Students of Color when they are unable to see and interact teachers who look like them (Achinstein & Ogawa, 2012). Stated differently,

none of us can ignore any longer the too many children who do not receive what they deserve, including a quality and caring education to help them develop into informed, thinking, moral, and empowered citizens. Undoubtedly, we need 32

teachers who are diverse not just in how they look, where they come from, the language they speak, the histories they embody, but in how they think and interact with others, and embrace the world. (Goodwin & McIntosh, 2008, p. 30)

Thus, paying the “educational debt” (Ladson-Billings, 2006) requires investing in a teaching force that is reflective of the demographic reality of students in our schooling spaces. Teachers of Colors’ presence within schooling spaces signal that that space (that school) is a place where People of Color belong, a place of membership. Inclusivity and a sense of belonging necessitate a pluralistic democracy, and for Students of Color, this feeling comes from seeing teachers who look like them in positions of power within schools.

What we know Further examination of the research on Teachers of Color reveals that the continued calls for increased diversification of the teacher workforce is primarily linked to the ability of Teachers of Color to engage and nurture Students of Color (e.g.,

Dilworth, 1990; Dixon & Dingus 2008; Monzó & Rueda, 2001; Pang, 2006). Thus, scholarship that centers Teachers of Color works to understand the ways Teachers of

Color see themselves, the aims of their work, and their pedagogical practices (e.g., Nieto,

2013; Salinas & Castro, 2010; Walker, 1996). Fundamental to these claims of ethno- racial pairing are notions of identity and epistemic privilege. As James Banks (1998) explains, our biographical experiences and interpretation of these experiences greatly influence how we come to know, construct, and see the world. For Teachers of Color,

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these experiences and interpretations are filtered through experiences with race, class, gender, sexuality, and their personal experiences within the structure of schools. The epistemological and ontological framing of their knowledge allows them to confront dominant narratives (Salinas & Sullivan; 2007) and in contrast enact linguistically and culturally relevant pedagogies (Aronson & Laughter, 2016; Marri, 2005).

Moreover, for Teachers of Color, the development of praxis is also rooted in the sources of knowledge, claims of knowledge, and their opposition to colonial epistemologies. For instance, Su (1998) studied African American, white and Latina/o preservice teachers and found that Teachers of Color “came to teaching with a keen awareness of the inequalities of [people who are economically disadvantaged] and minorities…[and] demonstrated strong social consciousness [while] express[ing] an urgent need to restructure the existing educational institutions” (p. 130). Delgado Bernal

(1998) situates this knowledge as “cultural intuition” – “a complex process that is experiential, intuitive, historical, personal, collective, and dynamic” (p. 568). From this

Chicana epistemological lens, Teachers of Color are able to trust and operate from their own instinctual knowledge of their communities and push past traditional notions of teaching and learning (Salinas et al., 2016). Such knowledge is necessary within education because it acknowledges that there exist “another voice, another reality” that understands and sees the needs of their students differently from their white teachers

(Delpit, 1986, p. 384).

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Similarly, Dillard (2000) offers endarkened feminist epistemology to describe the ways of knowing embodied in Black women that inform their educational practices. This epistemological stance is “located [at] the intersection/overlap of the culturally constructed socializations of race, gender, and other identities and the historical and contemporary contexts of oppressions and resistance” (p. 662). Teachers of Color, as well as teachers from communities that have historically been marginalized, reside at these intersections/overlaps, and see teaching as a way to push back against the oppressive nature of education (e.g., de los Ríos, 2013; Knight, 2002; Lynn & Jennings, 2009).

Women of Color, in particularly, are keenly aware of the structural inequity that impacts communities that exist at these intersections by virtue of their positionality (Koli et al.,

2019). Consequently, these teachers are informed by their historical understandings and experiences at the crossroads of their identities and, as a result, seek to disrupt inequitable schooling structures (e.g., Bondy, 2016; Gere, 2005; Hayes, 2014; Knight, 2014; Pang,

2009). Thus, crucial to a focus on Teachers of Color is intersectionality and the complexity of multiple identities including race, class, gender, and sexuality.

It is also imperative to acknowledge that notions of epistemic privilege, cultural intuition, and endarkened epistemology cannot assume an essentialized or monolithic treatment of Teachers of Color. In an analysis of the literature on Teachers of Color,

Brown (2014) noted that research “suggests it should not be presumed that all preservice

Teachers of Color recognize or understand how racism exists, even in the context of their own experiences” (p. 336). In other words, just because Teachers of Color may share 35

some cultural knowledge with their student, does not mean they are always able to bridge their cultural knowledge and pedagogy (Villegas & Davis, 2008) in the classroom.

Ultimately, to assume there is no intra-group difference among across ethnic/racial groups, is to do a great disservice to Teachers of Color in preparation and retention

(Achinstein & Aguirre, 2008).

Finally, while Teachers of Color have typically held ideals of commitment and service to their communities (Dilworth & Brown, 2007; Gay et al., 2003), the practices of

Teachers of Color are complex and often may diverge from normalized teacher education programs and schools (Phillip, 2011). Consequently, the “overwhelming presence of

Whiteness” in education often makes it difficult for Teachers of Color to negotiate schooling structures (Achinstein et al, 2010; Burant et al., 2002). For this reason, the literature also works to illuminate the ways Whiteness prevails within teacher education programs (Matias, 2016; Montecinos, 2004) and schools (Leonardo, 2009) making the retention and recruitment of Teachers of Color difficult (Ingersoll & May, 2011). For example, Sleeter (2016) examined teacher education programs through notions of Critical

Race Theory (CRT) – interest convergence, the pervasiveness of racism, and experiential knowledge – to find that Whiteness permeates and riddles teacher education programs in both subtle and overt ways, leaving teacher of color candidates feeling isolated and

“othered”. These teachers often go off to work in hard-to-staff schools in urban spaces that fail to retain teachers contributing to the cycle of turnover even in the face of their commitment and loyalty to these communities (Achinstein et al., 2010). Thus, current 36

literature calls on educational stakeholders to dive deeply into the narratives around

Teachers of Color in order to reframe our understandings around their “pushout” and

“keepout”, and find solutions to pull them in (also identified as “pulling in”) (Andrews et al., 2019, pp. 6-7).

Research on Latina/o(x) teachers The work regarding Latina/o(x) teachers can be categorized into four areas regarding ideological dispositions related to practice. First, much of the work on

Latina/o(x) Teachers of Color is situated in elementary bilingual education (e.g., Sánchez

& Ek, 2009). Focused on Latinx bilingual teachers working as “cultural guardians”

(Flores, 2017) and advocates of bilingual education rights (Espinosa, 2015), these

Teachers of Color have focused much of their efforts in sustaining their native/heritage language and confronting raciolinguistics policies that for decades have stripped

Latina/o(x) students of their home language (Flores & Rosa, 2015). For instance, as

Souto-Manning (2006) explained in her work on bilingual teachers “Shortly after I started teaching, I realized that there were plenty of parents, like me, crying for their children’s cultures, languages, discourses, and literacies to be valued in the classroom” (p. 293). For

Latina/o(x) bilingual teachers, their oppositional stances are rooted in their own experiences as bilingual speakers whose language was violently denied or notably affirmed.

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A second vein focuses attention on the microagressions (e.g., Urrieta, 2009) experienced by Latinx teachers and their use of more critical frameworks that allow for a confrontation of racist policies. For instance, Fránquiz et al. (2013) conclude Latina/o(x) bilingual classroom teachers view and act on behalf of their students and communities with a heightened awareness of the macro political terrain that has consistently used language as a proxy for racism (see DeNicolo & Fránquiz, 2006). In another project,

Fránquiz et al. (2011) examine how bilingual Latinx teachers resist majoritarian tales (see

Delgado, 2013) in developing their understanding of bilingual education policies, practice, and contexts. Similarly, Irizarry (2011) presents the counter narratives of five

Latinx teacher’s lives in order to acknowledge, make visible and value “the experiential knowledge present in Latino/a communities” (p. 2828).

Third, the scholarly work on Latina/o(x) teachers is often predicated upon some well-known bodies of work including funds of knowledge (Gonzalez et al, 1995), borderlands identities (Anzaldúa, 1987), Chicana epistemologies and kitchen pedagogies

(Delgado Bernal, 1998), Latino Critical Race Theory (Solorzano, 1997), and/or community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2006). These sociocultural and critical lenses bring to the forefront the experiences, understandings, and commitments of Latinx teachers and emphasize the more deliberate and ideological intent of teaching (Flores, 2017). For instance, in their “(re)articulating” of Chicana feminist epistemologies, Calderon et al.

(2012) recount that “validating alternative sources of knowledge ... provide[s] Chicana educators the ability to deconstruct the teacher/student binary…and move toward 38

decolonizing pedagogical models” (p. 519). Ramirez et al. (2016), for example, describe how a high school Latinx teachers teaching on the US/Mexican geopolitical border implore conocimientos and cariño in an effort to engage the complex identities of Latinx students. In sum, this research illuminates the ways Latina/o(x) teachers come to know and read the world and utilize their specialized knowledge to inform their praxis.

Finally, in the social studies, a few scholars have addressed the challenges of undocumented DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) students as they struggle with their civic rights (e.g., Dabach et al., 2018), the complexity of intersectionality, transnationalism and language (e.g., Bondy, 2016), and the engagement of Latina/o newcomers in civic education (e.g., Jaffee, 2016). Fewer pieces have examined the experiences of Latina/o(x) teachers and their practices in social studies classrooms. The literature regarding Latina/o(x) teachers attends to the ways these teachers utilize their epistemological understandings to counter and reconstruct the dominant historical narrative. For example, Latina/o(x) teachers locate their approaches to teaching history in their personal and cultural biographies (Salinas & Castro, 2010), and their historical positioning at the margins of the curriculum (Salinas & Sullivan, 2007). As a result, they critique and disrupt the flawed traditional curriculum by presenting alternative sources and constructing a nuanced narrative of history.

Additionally, using the notion of figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998) as a framework, Salinas et al. (2015) reveal that Latina/o(x) teachers exist multiple figured worlds; and in spaces, like their bilingual education classes, where their ways of knowing 39

were valued and they were to unpack and problematize the master figured world of social studies, Latinx teachers authored counter-narratives. Latinx teachers in a study from

Salinas et al. (2016) were also able to create counter-narratives or stories via LatCrit. As members of the ‘outgroup’, Latinx preservice bilingual education teachers “have a conscious understanding and collection of stories that serve to strengthen the group and disrupt the ideology that seems fair and justifies the positioning of the dominant and outgroup’s place in the narrative” (para. 45). Therefore, these teachers recognize the permeance of racism and the need to author new stories and commit to social justice to combat dominant ideologies. Lastly, research from Salinas et al. (2016) analyzes the tension between an official narrative of citizenship that suggest Latina/o(x) people are or may someday be citizens and the reality that access to full citizenship remains uncertain.

Following the experiences of a Latino preservice teacher and his experience with his late arrival student, this study calls on the use of border pedagogies – the recognition that

“ideological understandings and pedagogical practices that acknowledge Latinas/os’ citizenship is intimately tied to culture” (Salinas et al., 2016, p. 332) – by teachers and teacher educators to help raise consciousness and challenge dominant notions of civic identity and membership.

Research on African American/Black teachers The practices of Black teachers are rooted in resistance (e.g., Foster, 1997;

Walker, 2000; Williams, 2005) and a tradition of Black intellectual thought (Cooper,

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2017; Grant et al., 2016). The seeds of this resistance and awareness trail back to the period of enslavement where the descendants of African people were made to educate themselves and others through covert educational praxes (Gundaker, 2007). Operating with the knowledge that being discovered reading or disseminating information could possibly mean death, enslaved Africans through their own “implicit and explicit educational theor[ies]” defied the deficit and racist narratives crafted by slaveholders to construct an educational foundation premised on “success, leadership, self-help, [and] mutual aid” (Gundaker, 2007, p. 1595).

Following emancipation, Black people desired to be seen as full citizens (Darling-

Hammond et al., 2007), human (Du Bois, 1902), and deserving of the dignity (Cooper,

1892/2017) and education not afforded to Black people during the era of enslavement.

Cooper (2017) noted that:

The terms upon which Black bodies came to be gendered (and ungendered) were imprecise, capricious, and contingent such that much of the political projection of Reconstruction among Black people became preoccupied with creating legible categories of manhood, womanhood, and childhood that would make clear the ‘undisputed dignity’ of black people. (p. 20)

Thus, even as Black thought leaders debated the contents and means by which Black education would take place, echoed within all of their work was the belief that the educational experiment following enslavement should aim to combat notions of African

Americans as unintellectual, inferior, or culturally deprived (e.g., Grant et al., 2016;

Woodson, 1933/2008) – people who deserved to be treated as human. Consequently, following emancipation, the practices of Black educators were grounded in the need for 41

them to address the desire of the Black community to reframe Black personhood and pushback against the deficit frames imposed by the system of white supremacy.

Black thinkers and the Black community believed that Black teachers should be at the heart of this work. As Du Bois noted, Black teachers held no prejudice and hurtful beliefs about Black children and “underst[oo]d their audience” (p. 332). Often impacted by their own experiences and a sort of fictive kinship (Stack, 1975) that exists between

Black people, Black teachers “enjoyed close relationships with their pupils based on empathy with [each] individual child and an intimate knowledge of the black community” (Fairclough, 2004, p. 44). As Gordon (1985)

noted: African American cultural knowledge itself can be uniquely emancipatory for African Americans – because it is born out of the African American community’s historic common struggle and resistance against the various oppressive effects of capitalism and racism which have kept them in a subordinate position in American position. (p. 7)

Even in the presence of an unjust “system that failed to meet the needs of some of its students based on color”, teachers in segregated Black school, where the education of

Black children took place following enslavement, engaged in practices that could be viewed as successful in teaching Black children (Walker, 2000, p. 277). As Walker

(2000) noted, Black teachers during this era were:

consistently remembered for their high expectations for student success, for their dedication, and for their demanding teaching style, these [Black] teachers appear to have worked with the assumption that their job was to be certain that children learned the material presented. (pp. 265-266)

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Black teachers operated with the knowledge that their work would be tied to the constant need to pushback against a schooling system dominated by Whiteness, and the need to implement practices that were critical, varied, and wide-reaching (Lynn, 2002). Examples like “well known African American teachers … Septima Clark, Mary MacLeod Bethune,

Barbara Sizemore, Horace Mann Bond, Anna Julia Cooper, and countless others not only introduced Black children to the necessary skills and knowledge for success in the mainstream society but also taught them to fight for the liberation of Black people”

(Lynn, 2002, p. 123).

Other educators such as Booker T. Washington promoted an industrial approach to education which thought would lead to self-reliance and equality (Washington, 1896).

He believed that by not upsetting the status quo and maintaining a separate school space for Black people (Darling-Hammond et al., 2007), Black people learning from Black teachers could pull themselves up by the bootstraps and the “friction between the races

[would] pass away in proportion as the [Black] man, by reason of his skill, intelligence, and character, [could] produce something that the white man [wanted] or [respected] in the commercial world (Washington, 1986, p. 10). Influenced by Booker T. Washington,

Nannie Helen Burroughs also believed in an industrial and vocational approach to education, but unlike her counterpart, she was less concerned with the white gaze and acceptance (Murray, 2012). Burroughs relied on a network of Black women to maintain her school and devoted her work to the racial uplift and education of Black women

(Harley, 1996). Moreover, in utilizing pageants to deliver an alternative Black 43

curriculum, Burroughs sought to celebrate Black people and history and nurture the identity development of Black girls (Murray, 2012).

Thus, whatever the method, the work of these Black teachers was about community – a commitment to community tied to notions of racial uplift. This was particularly the case for Black women (Cooper, 2017; McCluskey, 1997; Murray, 2012).

Black women in their embodiment of multiple intersecting identities – the racial identity associated with their Blackness and the gendered identity associated with their womanhood, to say nothing of class and sexuality – could not be divorced from their practices as teachers (e.g., Knight, 2002). Thus, informed by these intersecting identities,

Black women often took up “womanist” notions of care in their work (McCluskey,

1997). The early work done by women like Laney, Bethune, Brown, and Burroughs – who were the founders of schools for Black women – act as an example of this

“womanist” approach to education. These women took up narratives of respectability, where girls were taught to be respectable and do domestic work, to create “safe” spaces for themselves and other young women to enter the schooling realm (McCluskey, 1997).

Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell, on the other hand, sought racial uplift by pushing back against the strict norms of respectability (Cooper, 2017). In the wake of a societal landscape that resisted change and was threatened by the embodiment of

Blackness and womanhood, these women, no matter how different their approach, put their bodies on public display to uplift other women, educate Black girls, and use their agency as a form of resistance. 44

Even in the face of an ever-changing school landscape (i.e., piecemeal integration followed by re-segregation), research continues to demonstrate that Black women ground their work in the Black feminist/womanist5 notions of caring of their foremothers.

Specifically, various studies have detailed the ways in which Black women enact a kind of familial pedagogy tied to Black feminist/womanist ideas in the form of “other- mothering” (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2005; Dixson & Dingus, 2008; Foster, 1993; Vickery,

2014). The practice of “other-mothering” centers around the belief that there is a shared responsibility to care for and advocate for students (Collins, 2000/2009). Mothering this way could look like a teacher who engages strong yet warm disciplinary practices

(Howard, 2001; Irvine & Fraser, 1998; Vickery, 2017b; Ware, 2006), or “skills-oriented” and “process oriented” approach to teaching (Delpit, 2006), or a type of holistic instruction that “stresses character building, [which] produc[es] students who are honest, responsible, respectful, skilled, cooperative, sympathetic to others, and who act in ways consistent with the social norms of classroom and larger community” (Howard, 2001, p.

186). No matter the type of curriculum enacted (Cornbleth, 1985), as Beauboeuf-

Lafontant (2005) explained, African American women think of themselves as “nurturers” and “surrogate mothers” who felt “their caring was a form of activism that challenged the subordinate social position of their students” (p. 442). Thus, “other-mothering” continues to be tied to the rich traditions of care where Black women work to address the

5 As noted in Collins (2000, 2009), Alice Walker employed the term womanist to address the notion of solidarity, and the term “womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender” (p. 46). Also (see Walker, 1983). 45

inadequacies of education in historically marginalized communities where care is needed most (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2005; Dixson, 2003; Irvine, 1989; Knight, 2004).

The sense of duty to racial uplift of the Black community and the commitment to care is not excluded to the realm of women. Informed by their own racialized, classed, and gendered experiences (Howard & Reynolds, 2013), research reports that Black men also take up similar notions of care and racial uplift. Lynn (2002) noted that “Black men teachers are committed to the ideals of “racial uplift’’ and utilize teaching as a means to improve and strengthen the community in the ways that Black women have done historically” (p. 127). Their commitment to this work “is both a tacit recognition and a principal response to…an inherently racist social, political, and economic structure” from which Black men are intimately aware (p. 128). In a study of eighteen Black teachers, both women and men, Foster (1993) found that this awareness informed pedagogical practices linked to racialized knowledge, commitment, and experiences in segregated communities. Thinking of themselves of kinsman or a kind of surrogate parent to their students, these teachers who were “proficient in community norms – [meaning they were] able to communicate with students in a familiar cultural idiom” (p. 391) – practiced holistic humanizing and caring teaching, aware of the “cosmetic changes in society [that] often [camouflaged] ongoing structural inequalities” (p. 380). Thus, it is through this familial-like relationship that Black teachers utilize their cultural knowledge to engage and interact with their students, and pushback against deficit notions of Students of Color as they navigate the White schooling structure (Duncan, 2019). 46

Furthermore, the existing discourse around Black male teachers also explains how and why they identify and are positioned as role models (Brown et al., 2018; Johnson et al., 2019), employ critical (Lynn et al., 1999) and culturally relevant (Pabon et al., 2011) approaches to pedagogy, work as “otherfathers” (Hicks, 2018; hooks, 2004; Lynn 2006), and act as change agents in their schools (Brown, 2012; Lynn & Jennings, 2009; Tafari,

2013). Leaving aside the performative nature of these characterizations and pedagogical practices (Brown, 2009), Black male teachers enact humanizing approaches in order to improve the educational and social conditions of their students and to uplift their communities (ross et al., 2016). For Black men who participate in Hip-Hop culture, much like the Black women who act as their Hip-Hop counterparts (Love, 2015), the roots of their performative practices are a part of a larger movement grounded in communal support and resistance, Hip Hop culture, and knowledge (Stovall, 2006; Tafari, 2018).

Bridges (2011) organizes these practices into three principles – “(a) call to service, (b) commitment to self-awareness, and (c) resistance to social injustice – [which emerge] from … the intersections between Hip Hop music, critical pedagogy and … teaching orientation” (p. 238). Thus, at the heart of all these practices, whether they incorporate

Hip-Hop or not, is the idea that Black male educators look at their students, particularly their Black students, and see their reflections staring back (Bridges, 2011; Lynn, 2002) which drives their commitment to their community.

However, despite evidence that demonstrates Black teachers often identify with these sort of savior-like discourses (e.g., othermothers and fathers; role models; culturally 47

aware educators), it is important to note that research also claims the practices of Black teachers have been constructed in ways that diminish and stereotype their contributions to the field (Madsen & Mabokela, 2000; Woodson & Pabon, 2016). Often pathologized and stereotyped as metaphoric “silver bullets”, “commodities”, and relative “kin” (Brown et al., 2018), these metaphors are precarious because they lack the historical and socio- political understandings that underpin the work of Black teachers, resulting in essentialized constructions of their practice (Brown et al., 2018). Furthermore, confined by the “narrow vision of their majority colleagues” (Madsen & Mabokela, 2000, p. 872), the discourse on Black teachers ignores or misses that varied ways Black teachers exist and operate in schooling spaces (e.g., Woodson & Pabon, 2016). Thus, while the literature illuminates the many ways Black teachers employ pedagogies grounded in

Black resistance and knowledge, it is important to acknowledge that Black educators are, at the end of the day, teachers (Brown et al., 2018), and their practices should be discussed and examined in a nuanced way.

HIP HOP AND CITIZENSHIP “One thing about the men that's controlling the pen”

Hip Hop emerged from the decaying conditions of the burning Bronx to become global phenomenon a voice for a generation of working-class urban youth (e.g., Chang,

2005; Kitwana, 2002; Rose, 1994). The 1950’s and 60’s had ushered in suburbanization and an urban renewal project in Manhattan that included the clearing of diverse

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communities to make way for the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Left in the wake of this project were displaced Black and Puerto Rican residents who had no choice but to relocate to places like Brooklyn and the South Bronx “where public housing was booming but jobs had fled” (Chang, 2005, p. 11). Black and Brown youth began searching for an outlet to escape the troubles of the dying city and have fun, and the house party scene became the outlet. Hip-Hop culture, “an integrated series of live community-based practices” (Dimitriadis, 1996, p. 179), emerged out of this scene.

The exact moment of this emergence is commonly thought to be at a party thrown by Cindy Campbell, DJ Kool Herc’s sister, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the South Bronx

(Chang, 2005; Ewoodzie, 2017). Ewoodzie (2017) argues, however, that Hip Hop’s origins are much more complex and that a convergence of socioeconomic circumstances, youth innovation, and place (geography) worked together to create Hip Hop. While DJ

Kool Herc may not have intended to create Hip Hop (Edwoozie, 2017), what emerged from that party changed youth and popular culture in way no one could have foreseen.

In the beginning, “the three kings” or “the trinity of hip-hop music” (Chang, 2005, p. 90) – DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash – spun and scratched records on turntables, dropped beats, and invited party-goers to participate in call-and- response routines as part of their performances. As the culture began to spread, it became a way of voicing rooted in counterhegemonic practices - DJing (i.e., turntablism), emceeing or MCing (i.e., rapping), break dancing (i.e., b-boying/b-girling), and graffiti

(Chang, 2005; Petchauer, 2009; Rose, 1994) – and activism (Cervantes & Saldaña, 2015; 49

Clay, 2006; Stovall, 2013), and the desire for visibility in a society that had ignored and forgotten them (Kitwana, 2002). These practices enabled young Black and Brown folx to author themselves outside of the confines of the white gaze (Dimitriadis, 2009) even in the face of the culture’s commodification (Watkins, 2005).

Additionally, Hip Hop’s practices were also grounded in knowledge of self and community (Love, 2016), and as the culture moved into the popular imagination, “more than any other movement initiated in the cultural margins of the United States, its products [became] commodified across boundaries of race, class, and nationality” (Heath,

2006, p. 859). Hip Hop was then “refashioned in ways that [would] respond to the experiences, traditions, imaginations, and desires of young people throughout the world”

(Hill, 2009, p. 1). For many young people, the culture then became, their “primary cultural, sonic, and linguistic windows on [and to] the world” (Rose, 1994, p. 19), as well as a way of carving out a communal space in the public sphere (Perry, 2004; Stapleton,

1998).

Thus, whether a street corner or basement, a small club or large stage, as a cultural practice, Hip Hop can be done anywhere. Even in schools, in classrooms. Given the originality of the voices that speak through Hip-Hop, the use of Hip-Hop in the classroom provides educators the opportunity to hear and learn from voices rarely heard within school spaces (Karvelis, 2018). More specifically, instead of the listening to and learning from the “official” knowledge of a history book, hip-hop artists often offer insights from lived experiences” (Karvelis, 2018, p. 47). Scholars and educators have 50

begun examining ways to locate Hop-Hop culture in the classroom and employ its pedagogical possibilities (Hill, 2009) given Hip Hop culture’s resonance in the lives of urban and non-urban young people, and the calls to improve educational outcomes for urban youth through the use of asset-based and culturally relevant approaches to teaching

(Ladson-Billings, 1995). Hip Hop Based Education (HHBE) grew out of this work.

In the following subsections, I explore the scholarship on Hip Hop culture and its use in education. Then, I examine the scant literature on Hip Hop and Social Studies

Education (SSE), exploring ways to bring these two fields into conversation. I will close with an evaluation of civic education and the role Hip Hop play in notions civic agency, identity, and membership.

Hip Hop in education HHBE refers to the utilization of “hip-hop (in most cases rap lyrics or songs) in classrooms for a variety of purposes” (Petchauer, 2009, p. 952). Practitioners and scholars who utilize HHBE practices engage Hip Hop’s elements in the field of education while often drawing on critical (e.g., Freire, 2000/2010), culturally relevant (Ladson-

Billings, 1995) and responsive (Gay, 2000) pedagogies to situate the work. The first wave of this work primarily attended to an examination of the ways Hip-Hop could be used to develop and bridge the gap between academic and critical literacy practices and skills

(e.g., Cooks, 2004; Hallman, 2009; Hill, 2009; Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002;

Wakefield, 2006), rethink the ways teachers should engage, negotiate, and center their

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students’ identities and diverse experiences (e.g., Dimitriadis, 2001; Hill, 2009; Love,

2015), and promote discussion, critical reflection, and action around important political and social issues with students (e.g., Love, 2014; Stovall, 2006; Williams, 2007). This work demonstrated the effectiveness of these texts, practices, and ways of being in producing favorable educational praxes, outcomes, and school environments (Petchauer,

2009, 2015).

The first wave also “focused almost exclusively on rap music or texts” (Hill &

Petchauer, 2013, p. 2), and was integral in extending the literature on asset-based pedagogies as much of the research employed critical and culturally relevant approaches.

Yet, as Emdin explains (2013), the use of rap lyrics as the primary element in HHBE:

Truncates the potential of hip-hop based education to truly reflect the complexities of hip-hop culture … [because while] rap is an artifact of hip-hop that holds much symbolic value in hip-hop culture [,] … it represents neither the full spectrum of hip-hopness (i.e., being hip-hop) nor the various modes of communication within hip-hop culture. (p. 12)

In other words, what was missing from a lot of the early work in HHBE was an examination of Hip Hop’s other cultural elements such as DJing or turntablism, sampling, graffiti writing, breakdancing, spoken word, and fashion.

As a result, more recent iterations, or the second wave of HHBE research, has called for HHBE scholars and practitioners to engage Hip Hop culture’s more complex aesthetic forms (Hill & Petchauer, 2013; Petchauer, 2015). More recent literature in

HHBE has sought to move beyond the encoding and decoding of rap lyrics to consider the ways Hip Hop’s other elemental practices – such as battling or cyphers (e.g., Emdin, 52

2011, 2013), spoken word (e.g., Hall, 2016; Low, 2011), graffiti writing (e.g., Brown,

2011; Jenkins, 2009; Petchauer, 2015), sampling and layering (e.g., Alim & Haupt, 2017;

Hafner, 2013; Petchauer 2012, 2016; Wakefield, 2006), and engaging with what is widely considered the fifth element of Hip Hop, knowledge of self and community (e.g., Hall,

2017; Love, 2014, 2015) – promote vibrant teaching and learning environments. The advantage of exploring Hip Hop culture through its aesthetic forms, is that these elements of Hip Hop produce “organic ideas, epistemologies, and dilemmas that can inform teaching and learning” (Petchauer, 2013). Consequently, it is at this intersection of the recent past and second wave of HHBE scholarship that the field of Social Studies

Education (SSE) can begin to engage the existing work done in HHBE and extend the critical work being done in both fields.

HHBE and social studies – Part 1 Love (2014) argues that democratic education is rooted in the critical voices of young people and “hip-hop music and culture is where [young people] find [the] voice to participate and challenge injustice within our democratic society” (p. 57). Pre-K-12

Social Studies is the area within schools where young people grapple with the structures and functions of democracy and civic education (Navarro & Howard, 2017; Parker,

2010). Yet with the exception of Stovall (2006, 2013), Childs (2014), and Kumar (2016), scholarship within the field provides little by way of HHBE, even though young people, particularly young People of Color, participate in Hip Hop culture and bring their Hip-

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Hop sensibilities (Love, 2016) into the classroom. In this sense, not only Hip Hop, but also our students, who find their voice and ways of expression through Hip Hop culture, have something to say to Social Studies Education (SSE). Consequently, I see the possibilities of HHBE working in the field of social studies primarily in three ways: (1)

HHBE can act as a counternarrative and a means for counter-storytelling; (2) HHBE fosters space to contend with issues of race and racism; and (3) HHBE can aid the field of

SSE in nurturing and promoting social justice and action.

The existing narratives within the social studies curriculum work together to craft narrow conceptions of civic agency, identity, and membership through the centering of white, Eurocentric, cigendered, male experiences (Almarza & Fehn, 1998; Epstein, 2009;

Loewen, 2007). Within this larger white dominated narrative are themes of progress and celebratory conclusions to tensions that situate race, class, gender, and sexuality (Hess,

2005; Ross, 2014; Stanley & Longwell, 2004). The problem with this narrative is that whole topics, peoples (specifically People of Color), and various values and cultural experiences are absent or null (Parker, 2010), and the hidden or implicit curriculum advances a singular romanticized colorblind narrative of our pluralistic democracy (King

& Chandler, 2016). Counter-narratives introduce these missing perspectives (Salinas et al., 2012) to “provide a broader understanding of historical events that strengthen subject matter content yet also disrupt dominant narratives that are narrow, inaccurate, and harmful to People of Color” (Navarro & Howard, 2017, p. 219). Thus, the incorporation of counter-stories (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), a Critical Race Theory (CRT) 54

methodology, are one way to challenge and reframe the dominant narratives expressed within these three curricula and are needed in SSE to develop our pluralistic democracy.

Rap music, a predominant part of Hip Hop culture, “is a form of rhymed storytelling accompanied by high rhythmic, electronically based music” (Rose, 1994, p.

2) that like counternarrative storytelling “has always told the story of the ‘other

America’” (Land & Stovall, 2009). For example, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious

Five’s track, “The Message”, was one of the first rap records to describe this “other”

America that also went mainstream (see Dimitriadis, 2001 and Rose,1994). Underscored by the music video, the track tells the story of inner-city degradation, poverty, and neglect; a story not found within the social studies curriculum. Stories like this prioritize the voices of people on the margins (i.e., Black and Brown folx) and are often told by rap artists (emcees) who speak to their own histories and tell stories of their personal experiences (Dimitriadis, 2009; Rose, 1994). Therefore, rap music and Hip Hop culture has “established itself as a kind of alternative curriculum” (Dimitriadis, 2001, p.24) – a

“counter-curriculum [that] … challenges the myths, presuppositions, and supposed wisdoms of the official curriculum—as it is raced, gendered, classed, and sexualized”

(Baszile, 2009, p. 13). Hip Hop artist, by extension, are producers of critical knowledge on issue of the lived experiences and oppression of People of Color, and through their lyrics and practice create a type of critical curriculum (e.g., Guillory, 2005)

Stovall’s (2006) work demonstrated the ways Hip Hop could work as a counternarrative in social studies. Through an analysis of Hip Hop lyrics, alongside a 55

reading of Howard Zinn’s book, Stovall (2006) illuminated omissions and distortions within the dominant narrative of the social studies curriculum for his students.

Additionally, Dimitriadis (2009), working with a group of urban youth at a local community center who disliked and rejected how Black History was taught (e.g., the focus on Martin Luther King), found that by introducing Black popular culture through films (e.g., Panther) featuring Hip Hop artists, history could be made real, moving from a

“noun to a verb” (p. 121), and help develop historical consciousness. Thus, the messages and work from prominent Hip-Hop artists and scholars demonstrates the possibility and power of Hip-Hop’s storytelling as a transformative counter-narratives within the social studies curriculum. For these reasons, if SSE aims to be more inclusive of the varied histories, experiences, and narratives of diverse storytellers, scholars and practitioners should begin to consider HHBE’s ability to function as a counternarrative in social studies.

Furthermore, the literature in SSE has shown that discussions of race and racism are either absent or incomplete. This has led to critical researchers in the field calling for a social studies curriculum that includes broader and more nuanced discussions of race and racism (e.g., Brown & Brown, 2015; Epstein, 2009; Heilig et al., 2012; Howard,

2004). These scholars have taken-up CRT and its tenets to forefront issues of race and racism emphasizing the endemic nature of race and racism and the power of counter- storytelling (e.g., Chandler, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2003). In the realm of Hip Hop research, Cummings (2014) asserts that because CRT and Hip-Hop emerged around the 56

same time they shared a kind of “furious kinship”, made evident by the fact that “Hip-hop reinforces the basic insights of CRT, including the notion that racism is a normal and relentless fact of daily life” (p. 111).

This kinship is exemplified in a study done by Pulido (2009) with twenty

Chicago-area Latina/o youth. Utilizing a CRT and LatCrit lens, Pulido (2009) discovered that these young people employed Hip Hop music as both a pedagogy and interpretive lens to examine, understand, mediate, and challenge the ways they had been racialized in their schools, communities, and society. Hip Hop music was therefore considered a vital source for critically raced knowledge that spoke to spoke to their experiences in a unique way. The music was theirs and they took ownership of it, claiming that Hip Hop was

“music fit for us minorities” (Pulido, 2009, p. 68).

In another study, Netcoh (2013) used a critical media lens and music from Lupe

Fiasco, NAS, and Eminem to examine whether secondary and post-secondary schools could provide the space to critically interrogate the racial discourse found within Hip Hop culture and deter white adolescents from taking up colorblind ideologies and stereotypes.

The study found that by engaging with Hip Hop in secondary and post-secondary spaces, specifically with white adolescents, critical dialogue could be generated (Netcoh, 2013).

In other words, Hip Hop “afford[ed] [both] counternarratives to America’s dominant racial discourse and stereotypical racial representations” and challenged dominant notions of People of Color (Netcoh, 2013, p. 10). The work done by Netcoh (2013) and

Pulido (2009) illuminates Hip Hop as a powerful medium through which issues of race 57

and racism can be explored by listening to the voices of people the most affected by their constructions. Given that these voices are often silenced in SSE, the field should begin to recognize the meaningful dialogues taking place within Hip Hop, bring those conversations into the field, and consider the ways Hip Hop culture can inform the social studies curriculum about issues of race.

Finally, literature within the field of social studies also recognizes the need for a critically oriented curriculum that leads to social action and justice (Tyson & Park, 2008).

Yet, the field primarily attends to this call is through critical historical inquiry (Salinas et al., 2012) and civic action (e.g., Stovall, 2013). Hip Hop offers the Social Studies another way to build to a justice-oriented, conscious raising curriculum. This is because Hip Hop culture serves as a site where young people develop critical consciousness and work to combat injustice through activism and social justice. Rose (1994) notes that,

oppressed people use language, dance, and music to mock those in power, express rage, and produce fantasies of subversion … [which] produce communal bases of knowledge about social conditions, communal interpretations of them and quite often serve as cultural glue that fosters communal resistance. (pp. 99-100)

These communities, which are under constant surveillance and attack from those in power, consciously or unconsciously seek ways to resist. By enacting hidden transcripts of resistance that go unrecognized by those in power, Hip Hop culture through means of expression like language (slang), dance, and music acts as a communal form of unique defiance and knowledge that transforms in new and innovative ways, when those in power discover it (Rose, 1994). Therefore, Hip Hop is the embodiment of social justice

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and an expression of the ways young people work to shake up societal power structures, a disruptive pedagogy (Mills, 1997). The field of social studies should consider engaging

Hip-Hop’s more critical praxes (see Akom, 2009), which take up social justice and liberatory pedagogies as means to promote resistance and social justice. Besides, many of our students are already participating in Hip Hop culture, particularly Students of Color, so providing a historical context around their Hip-Hop practices through SSE an aid in developing justice-oriented citizens.

HHBE and social studies – Part 2 While HHBE offers much to the field of social studies, so does social studies to

HHBE in three ways. First, much of the work done in HHBE utilizes an ethnographic or teacher-researcher methodology (Dimitriadis, 2015; Irby & Hall, 2013). This means the work may lack objectivity of the praxis (Dimitriadis, 2015), limit what we know about the possibilities of HHBE with teachers who are not as familiar with Hip Hop culture and lacks the varied voices of in-service teachers who may be utilizing the practice but do not have the access to publishing. Also, these ethnographic or teacher-researcher methodologies tend to focus on the how students’ take up, understand, and utilize the Hip

Hop culture to make sense of the curriculum, their identities, and the world (e.g., Dando,

2017; Hill, 2009; Love, 2015). While this work is important, there is a whole generation of teachers in, and entering in the field, who grew up with Hip Hop much like their students. HHBE still has work to do understanding how these teachers perceive,

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understand, take up and use Hip Hop in their own instructional practice, and how their participation in Hip Hop culture informs their identities as people and as teachers. SSE’s engagement with case study and in-service teachers can aid HHBE scholarship in moving beyond teacher-research perspectives.

Secondly, HHBE is sometimes misunderstood and taken up in ways that turn it into a gimmick where teachers are rapping and dancing in class to sound cool and relate to their students. This turns Hip Hop culture into something fun to do, instead of a form of identity, knowledge, and resistance. Love (2018), in the podcast Hip Hop Can Save

America, argues that this misunderstanding happens because many teachers, even those who participate in Hip Hop culture, have an ahistorical understanding of the struggles behind Hip Hop culture and the ways the work sprouted out of communities who wanted to be heard. Thus, without the historical context behind Hip Hop, HHBE becomes a gimmick that teacher do not know when (e.g., when to stop class down and allow the student to engage in a cypher) or how to use. The mere fact that SSE scholars and practitioners teach history and incorporate disciplinarian approaches to knowledge (i.e., historical inquiry/thinking (Salinas et al., 2012; Wineburg, 2001)) makes SSE a ripe place to HHBE work to be done, without it turning into a gimmick. Furthermore, engaging Hip

Hop culture in connection with social studies means that teachers must address Hip Hop culture in all its complexities – the misogyny, homophobia, hypermasculinity and meritocratic messages that exist in the culture (Hill, 2009; Love, 2015; Rose, 1994) – because at the heart of SSE are socio-political issues and discussions of human behavior. 60

This means social studies classroom are ripe spaces where students and teachers can interrogate the problems in Hip Hop and examine the social and political environments that may influence the people who engage in the culture, helping to address some of the trepidation teachers have about utilizing Hip Hop because think it sends the wrong messages.

Lastly, HHBE’s second wave is trying to push the field beyond the sole use of rap lyrics. If SSE starts to engage HHBE, it can help expand the second wave of the HHBE field. For instance, McAvoy and Hess (2013) note the importance of classroom deliberation in our era of political polarization. This deliberation could happen through something like a cypher or battle an element the second wave of HHBE is beginning to address. Additionally, (Garrett & Kerr, 2016) argue that SSE is often infused with aesthetic texts (e.g., poetry, art, film, photography, music) which promote critical thinking, foster empathy, and aid historical analysis. They contend that “social studies education could be considered to be operating most powerfully when it is involved or infused with aesthetic education” (Garrett & Kerr, 2016, p. 525). HHBE can aid in providing the social studies with more forms of aesthetic texts, which are also texts students are more familiar with. Thus, by bringing together the second wave work of

HHBE and SSE, scholars and practitioners can help extend and push the work in both fields.

Even though they are essentially about the same thing – humanity, how people live and make sense of the world, HHBE and SSE have yet to converge in a substantive 61

way. The possibilities for scholarship in this area of HHBE and SSE are, therefore, considerable.

Citizenship Literature has shown that the field of social studies has been charged with preparing a diverse student population for participation in civic life (Swan et al., 2013), primarily in an effort to construct and preserve “American” ideals and nurture a sense of communal support of the nation-state (VanSledright, 2008). Banks (2008) notes that

“citizenship education should ... help students to develop an identity and attachment to the global community and a human connection to people around the world” (p. 134). Yet, the parameters and defining characteristics of citizenship, and the rights thereby granted and inferred, have been in continual flux since the establishment of our democracy. Thus, scholars have called on the field to reconstruct the traditional civic narratives of African

Americans (Busey & Walker, 2017; King, 2016; Vickery, 2017a, 2017b; Woodson,

2016), Asians and Asian Americans (Rodríguez 2017, 2018), Latina/o(x) (Cruz, 2002;

Salinas et al., 2016; Santiago, 2017), and Indigenous peoples and native nations (Dunbar-

Ortiz, 2014; Lomawaima, 2013; Sabzalian, 2019). The following subsections will explore the literature around the common form of citizenship education found in schools, critiques of the traditional approach, and the discourses that scholars are calling on to complicate dominant forms of citizenship education.

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The dominant citizenship discourses Scholarship notes that citizenship education is often taken-up in its most traditional forms (Guttmann, 2000; Hahn, 2008; Hess, 2004;). In its normative form, the work of citizen making characteristically involves engaging students in discussions around governmental process (Parker, 2008, 2010), and deference to democratic principles and values like freedom, justice, and patriotism (Westheimer 2006, 2009).

Westheimer and Kahne (2004) provide an evaluative framework of the civic education found in many schools and three citizenship typologies emerged – personally responsible, participatory, and justice-oriented. Of the three, personally responsible and participatory citizenship education were most prevalent. These citizenship types stress the importance of obeying laws, having “good” character, and being active in your community, but they lack a critical analysis of structural inequality and the racial prerequisites historically required for citizenship (Ladson-Billings, 2004) and fail to recognize the complex notions of citizenship enacted by Communities of Color (e.g., Busey & Walker, 2017; King et al.,

2016; Vickery, 2015). As a result, students learn narrow and simplified notions of citizenship that ignore the complex experiences of many people (e.g., Knight, 2011;

Urrieta, 2004).

Abowitz and Harnish (2006) identify the discourses of citizenship education.

They contend the most common, “the civic republican and liberal discourses continue to define and powerfully shape how U.S. society understands citizenship and the ways in which the society's institutions, such as schools, thereby shape citizens” (p. 657). The

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civic republican and liberal discourses, which mirror Westheimer and Kahne’s (2004) typologies of personally responsible and participatory citizenship, emphasize civic knowledge and unified national identity, liberty and individualism, and a notion of tolerance that placates a call for embracing a more plural democracy. However, these two dominant discourses, or typologies, lack nuanced discussions of membership and identity, and engendered scholarship that challenges these dominant conceptualizations of citizenship.

Thinking more critically about citizenship In contrast, critical discourses of citizenship education have expanded the dialogue around civic education by “challenging us to look at the histories of who has been welcomed into the civic realm and who has not” (Abowitz & Harnish, 2006, p.

680). Furthermore, critical citizenship discourses work to center the civic reality and understandings of historically marginalized people while also calling for a reimagined civic space that acknowledges the cultural (Kymlicka, 1995), civil, political, and social rights (Marshall, 1997) of diverse racial, ethnic, and lingual groups (Banks, 2008).

Multicultural citizenship for example is a transformative form of citizenship that

“redefines traditional notions of citizenship and what it means to be a citizen by moving beyond conventional approaches and definitions” (Dilworth, 2008), and it “recognizes the right and need for students to maintain commitments to their cultural communities, to a transnational community, and to the nation-state in which they are legal citizens” (Banks,

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2008, p. 134). For People of Color who have been historically disenfranchised and civically estranged (Tillet, 2012), multicultural citizenship enables the examination of their civic experiences and the ways in which unequal power operates in society to determine access to citizenship. Multicultural discourse of citizenship also means that the identities of students whose experiences are often missing from the dominant narrative within civic education are affirmed. Thus, when students learn their racial and ethnic histories and their lived experiences are centered within the social studies curriculum, they feel civically engaged and empowered to participate and act in their communities

(Halagao, 2004; Tyson, 2002).

Critical civic discourses also encompass analyses of citizenship as it relates to sexual orientation (Hayes, 2014) and gender identity (Dillabough & Arnot, 2000). Claims to full citizenship and the right to operate in the public space (Yuval-Davis, 2006), particularly for women of color, are bound up not only in the ways their bodies are gendered, but also in the ways those same bodies are racialized, classed, and misrecognized by the dominant culture (Harris-Perry, 2011). Feminist discourses recognize the ways women negotiate the public space and lay claim to citizenship often through subversive and transformative civic acts (Bondy, 2016; Knight, 2002). Thus, scholarship urges the field to take up an intersectional lens to social studies and civic education and “embrace a curriculum that centers the voices and experiences of women and People of Color to define and speak their own truths” (Vickery, 2018).

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Of equal importance, discourses of queer citizenship utilize queer theory to challenge the dominant notions of civic education. Queer theorist, like feminist scholars, problematize the public/private divide. Queer scholarship notes that members of the

LGBTQIA+ community are unable to divorce who they are behind close door with their public selves (Camicia, 2016). For this reason, LGBTQIA+ people challenge normative notions of civic space by emphasizing performative engagement and social action and carving out their own agentic spaces (Butler, 1990). Queer citizenship discourses work to

“[reframe] civic life not as a sphere in which individuals enact their beliefs but as a diverse, open stage where people perform their lives and social worlds” (Abowitz &

Harnish, 2006, p. 674). In short, by attending to the histories of historically marginalized peoples and centering their civic identity and agency, queer citizenship discourse, as well as other critical discourses, work to reclaim civic belonging and visibility where it has historically been denied.

Cultural citizenship Cultural citizenship, as a critical discourse, explicitly addresses the ways language and culture have excluded people, particularly Latina/o(x) people, from full civic membership. As Rosaldo (1997) explains, Latina/o(x) people “always live with the mark indicating that whether [they] belong or not in this country is always a question” (p. 31).

Though often rejected as full citizens, cultural citizenship also explains how Latina/o(x)

“groups are claiming membership in this society as they struggle to build communities,

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claim social rights, and become recognized as active agents in society” (Flores &

Benmayor, 1997, p. 2). The distinct social practices and spaces embody a Latina/o(x) consciousness that gives culture an inseparable role in the identity and claims of citizenship (Silvestrini, 1997). Cultural citizenship then provides a “sense of belonging to a community, a feeling of entitlement, the energy to face everyday adversities and a rationale for resistance” (Silvestrini, 1997, p. 43).

In the context of this study, cultural citizenship is reflected in a civic narrative that reveals both the oppressions of People of Color and the ways in which those communities can and do claim a counter narrative (Salinas, 2006). In this analysis of a world geography curriculum used for late arrival immigrants, Jaffee (2016) contends that critical views of space reveal the important contributions and civic identities of

Communities of Color. Ladson Billings (2007) also contends that the narratives of self- determination and cultural preservation are inherent to African American history (e.g.,

Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association) that are essential to teaching in the social studies and the civic identities of Communities of Color.

Ultimately, cultural citizenship “includes how groups form, define themselves, define their membership, claim rights and develop a vision of the type of society they want to live in” (Flores, 1997, p. 263).

In the social studies classroom, cultural citizenship narratives describe not only how Latina/o(x) are acted upon but also how they act in response (Fránquiz & Salinas,

2011). In this sense, cultural citizenship serves as a stance that emphasizes the civic 67

identity, agency, and membership of People of Color through the teaching of counter narrative (Salinas et al., 2018). However, if cultural citizenship is both the “process of self-making and being made in relation to the nation states” (Ong, 1999, p. 263), power is of the utmost important in this process. Ong contends that Rosaldo and his colleagues have an ‘erroneous impression’ that ignores the unequal relationship between People of

Color and the nation state that seeks to preserve power. Self-making, Ong argues, is not as easily manifested through social practices and claims of right, but rather a massive struggle with a growing neoliberal, human capital assessment of citizens. I note Ong’s critique in acknowledging the challenges faced by People of Color and teachers that use pedagogies of resistance to promote other civic narratives and critical discourses. This project focuses on those moments where social studies teachers, living in Ong’s neoliberal spaces, enact Rosaldo’s and others’ sense of cultural citizenship.

Citizenship and Hip Hop Much like the discourse of cultural citizenship, Hip Hop “is a cultural form that attempts to negotiate the experiences of marginalization, brutally truncated opportunity, and oppression within the cultural imperatives of African-American and Caribbean history, identity, and community” (Rose, 1994, p. 21). Thus, culture that people participate in worldwide, acts as a way for those who have been historically marginalized, particularly Black and Brown folx, to maintain their visibility and identity within the dominant civic culture by carving out a communal and agentic space. Few

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studies have examined this link between civic identity and engagement and the role of

Hip Hop.

One study that has done this work explored the link between Hip Hop in the field of arts education and citizenship. After exploring the literature on the civic engagement gap, Kuttner (2016) argued that civic educators relied too heavily on a narrowly defined discourse of civic participation. Working from the notion that young people from

Communities of Color have been and continue to be increasingly alienated from traditional forms of civic engagement, Kuttner calls for a,

culturally sustaining civic engagement pedagogy [emphasis added] … to value the civic skills, knowledge, and attitudes already embedded in youths’ cultural communities as part of a broader project of redefining what it means to be a “competent and responsible” member of a society. (p. 531)

He then goes on to describe how a non-profit youth organization – Project HIP-HOP – through the joining of Hip-Hop arts and cultural organizing developed critical consciousness to build knowledge of the system and self, fostered communal unity and family, and catalyzed student action. Project HIP-HOP’s work points to the vast “civic resources available in hip-hop culture and … engagement with the hip-hop arts can connect youth to these resources” (Kuttner, 2016, p. 549). Thus, Kuttner’s work highlights the ways “Hip-Hop citizens” have been disaffected in schools, and how schools should recognize the different ways Students of Color participate civically.

Other studies explore the ways Hip-Hop has informed global social movements in different countries. For example, Pero (2016) explored the ways Black Cuban rappers

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give voice to the racialized experiences of Black Cubans while “also craft[ing] new understandings of black Cuban selfhood and forms of racial citizenship by way of rap music and the broader global imagine of hip-hop culture” (p.4). These rappers laid claim

“to multiple notions of citizenship” that worked to challenge Cuba’s “nonracial exceptionalism”, illustrating how Cuban Hip-Hop “render[ed] [the] realties of race both visible and acutely audible” (p. 16). Thus, these studies confirm Rosaldo’s argument and demonstrate the ways in which Hip-Hop acts as a conduit for claims to citizenship for people have been historically marginalized.

Returning to Cole (2018), we also see all these ideas come together. Pushing back against a system that uses his taxes to continue the systemic oppression of people from his community – through their miseducation of People of Color and funding of corrupt corporations that put guns in his neighborhood, Cole offers his own solution:

Better yet, let me decide, bitch, it’s 2018 Let me pick the things I’m funding from an app on my screen Better that than letting wack congressmen I’ve seen … (“Brackets”, verse 2, lines 18-20).

Laying stake in the public discourse around taxes, his words act as a form of civic resistance and agency. Similar forms of civic identity exist in our students and teachers, and SSE must contend with these forms of civic knowledge and participation.

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Chapter 3: Methodology

I grew up on the fabric of telling stories and not making everything so plain.

- Rapsody

The writing process, the way I go about it is I do whatever the beat feels like, whatever the beat is telling me to do. Usually when the beat comes on, I think of a hook or the subject I want to rap about almost instantly. Within four, eight bars of it playing I’m just like ‘Oh, OK. This is what I wanna do.’

- Eminem

INTRODUCTION The dominant narrative in Social Studies locates itself in a discourse of exceptionalism (Barton & Levistik), white lensing (Chandler, 2009), and heroes and villains of Western lore (Loewen, 1995/2007). Left at the edges, or even omitted by this narrative, are the histories and lived experiences of teachers and students from historically marginalized communities (Pang & Nelson, 2006; Wills, 2001). As a result,

Teachers of Color who find their narratives located in these marginal spaces work to combat this discourse. Hip Hop in its ability to reflect “both the beauty and the belly of the beast in American society, refracted through the lens of [B]lack American culture”

(Perry, 2004, p. 2) can act as a medium that centers the voices of minoritized communities and critical citizenship. Thus, the purpose of this critical qualitative case study (Thomas, 2016) was to document and analyze the ways preservice and in-service

Teachers of Color utilize the disruptive pedagogy of Hip Hop to unsettle the dominant

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narrative found within the Social Studies curriculum. Specifically, this study will address three research questions:

1. Why do Teachers of Color take up Hip Hop culture in their social studies

classrooms?

2. How do Teachers of Color use Hip Hop culture in social studies

classrooms?

3. How does Hip Hop music and culture act as a pedagogical tool that

disrupts dominant notions of citizenship and social studies?

In this chapter, much like Eminem and Rapsody, I layout the process of my research and the fabric I used to tell the story of this study. First, I discuss the conceptual frameworks that guided the study and the lenses used to analyze the data. Then I discuss how my positionality drove my research. Next, I detail the research design as it relates to the following pieces: 1) qualitative case study research methodology and research paradigm, 2) participants and school contexts, 3) data collection, and 4) data analysis.

Finally, I explain and provide examples of various data sources, methods of analysis, and the limitations inherent in the research.

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Illustration 1: From Harlem with Love: A Mural Project for Yuri & Malcolm9

A conceptual or theoretical framework is “the system of concepts, assumptions, expectations, beliefs, and theories that supports and informs your research” (Maxwell,

2005, p. 33). In this study, notions of Critical Race Theory (CRT), intersectionality, and

Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) work in concert to act as the conceptual framework.

These theories are represented visually by the mural in Illustration 1. Located at 125th

Street and Broadway in New York, From Harlem with Love: A Mural Project for Yuri &

Malcolm (see Illustration 1, From Harlem with Love: A Mural Project for Yuri &

9 Utilizing Rose’s (1994) notion of Hip Hop principles as a blueprint for social resistance and affirmation, I consider street murals/art as a Hip Hop aesthetic form that makes the civic knowledge and resistance of People of Color visible by laying claim to public space; much like ruptures and layers of graffiti writing (Petchauer, 2015). Led by a collective of community organizers and artist who fight for justice and liberation, this mural was a community-based art and education project intended to honor the lives, legacies, and friendship of Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama. See/visit the following websites: http://cargocollective.com/shiftingmovements/The-Yuri-and-Malcolm-Project and https://manhattanville.columbia.edu/news/mural-celebrating-history-west-harlem-community. Each illustration utilizes images, sometimes zoomed in, from these websites. 73

Malcolm) is a community-based street mural that exemplifies civic knowledge and engagement premised on a re-centering of voices often silenced within society, community cultural practices, and intersectionality.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an interdisciplinary premise that draws on and extends literature from gender, ethnic, and cultural studies, and critical theorist in law and social class (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001). When CRT surfaced in the 1970’s, scholars, lawyers, and activist of color realized that the progress made during the civil rights era had stalled or were being rolled-back (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). In response, CRT was developed to examine and explain the setbacks experienced by People of Color following the headway that had seemingly been made in the 1960’s. Subscribing to five tenets of analysis, activist and scholars unearth the subtler forms of racism that function to impede advancements for People of Color (Bell, 1992, 1995; Crenshaw, 1991; Crenshaw et al.,

1995 ) causing ruptures in the societal discourse.

Delgado and Stefancic (2017) describe these tenets as:

• the notion that racism is normal or ordinary part of society; • the ordinariness of racism and interest convergence leads to colorblindness and makes racism difficult to address; • race is a social construction; • differential racialization and its consequences, and the notion of intersectionality and anti-essentialism; • the notion of centering voices of color.

Thus, by “illuminating the racist nature of the American legal system [and other societal

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structures], CRT adherents are particularly interested in the legal [and material] manifestations of white supremacy and the perpetuation of the subordination of people of

Bcolor” (Wing, 2002, p. 161). In other words, CRT works to crack the foundational paradigm of structural inequality on which the nation was built and shift the way society sees the relationship between race, racism, and power (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017).

Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) introduced CRT into the field education to understand how race operated in the schooling system and launched much of the literature on CRT and education. As institutions rooted in white supremacy, schools through their social, political, and economic practices (Apple, 2004; Bonilla-Silva, 2010) are part of the larger racial project. Utilizing this theory as a lens provides a framework for examining the ways race and power operate in schools by speaking to the subjugation of People of Color, and it enables scholars “to more specifically highlight particular structures, events, behaviors and outcomes, in different areas of education” (DeCuir-

Gunby et al., 2019, p. 6). Moreover, its presence in the field acts as an “intervention that aims to halt racism by highlighting its pedagogical dimensions and affirming an equally pedagogical solution rooted in anti-racism” (Leonardo, 2013, p. 12).

Ladson-Billings and Tate’s (1995) analysis was premised on three assertions – (1)

“race continues to be a significant factor in determining inequity in the United States”,

(2) “U.S. society is based on property rights”, and (3) “the intersection of race and property creates an analytic tool through which we can understand social (and, consequently, school) inequity” (p. 48). Thus, CRT begins with the premise that race and 75

racism cannot be separated from society and therefore the structures that operate within schools – as “racism as endemic and deeply ingrained in American life” (Ladson-Billings

& Tate, 1995, p. 55) – and when applied to the field of education, CRT can root out systemic inequality and inequity that affect People of Color (Dixson, A. D., & Roussseau,

2006; Ledesma & Calderón, 2015). Altogether, theses tenets act as a tool of analysis of school curriculum (e.g., Chandler, 2015; Tyson, 2003), pedagogy (Lynn et al., 2013;

Martell & Stevens, 2017; Parker & Stovall, 2004), and educational research methods

(e.g., DeCuir-Gunby et al., 2019; Parker 2015; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) that illuminates the racist structures of the schooling system.

CRT, education, and social studies The structures, processes, and discourses that make up different segments of the schooling curriculum, present, organize, and justify a curriculum that centers white middle/upper class heteronormative experiences as norm/typical while “othering” communities who do not fit the mold (Yosso, 2002). Additionally, as people come to understand how they are perceived and racialized, “the racialization of the [official] curriculum and the hidden curriculum of race become powerful forces in the educational endeavor” (Leonardo, 2013, p. 123). As a result, “CRT sees the official school curriculum as a culturally specific artifact designed to maintain a White supremacist master script” (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 18) that becomes normalized through the various texts that exist in schools.

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This norming exists within the social studies curriculum. Despite critiques from critical and multicultural scholarship that have led to some changes within the discipline and marginal progress (Brown & Brown, 2015), social studies curriculum and textbooks continue to dilute or omit the institutional nature of racism and inequity and place groups who have been historically marginalized and at the periphery (e.g., An, 2016; Brown &

Brown, 2010; Clark & Camicia, 2017; Díaz & Deroo, 2020; Epstein, 2009; Sabzailian,

2019). This creates a discourse of invisibility (Ladson-Billings, 2009) and politics of undetectability (Leonardo, 2009) that allows Whiteness to be both visible and invisible and reduces racism to individual acts – “bad guys doing bad things” (Brown & Brown,

2010, p. 60) – instead of something entrenched in our larger systems (King & Chandler,

2016). This also enables pedagogies of avoidance [emphasis added], where teachers can duck issues or narratives within the curriculum that they have little knowledge of or feel uncomfortable teaching (Levstik, 2000). In other words, Social Studies curricula and textbooks start with the premise of America as a successful case for democracy; a country that was able to overcome the racial, gender, and class tensions of its past. It is false narrative that excludes stories and experiences that cannot be tied up neatly into an unblemished story of America. Thus, the social studies curriculum continues to marginalize people who have no tangible access to white middle/upper class heteronormative narratives.

As a result, scholars have called for the use of CRT as a framework in social studies to evaluate and challenge the race-neutral narratives of curriculum, citizenship, 77

and pedagogy that silence the voices of people of color (Chandler & McKnight, 2012;

Ladson-Billings, 2009; Navarro & Howard, 2017). For example, studies have illuminated the need for more critical discussions and analyses of race and racism in curriculum and textbooks (e.g., An, 2016; Brown & Brown, 2010; Nelson & Pang, 2006; Vickery et al.,

2015), and in the work concerning citizenship education (e.g., Bermudez, 2014; Busey &

Walker, 2017; Vickery 2015). Additionally, investigations of issues of race and racism regarding social studies teacher education have uncovered the need for teacher educators to engage preservice teacher in the historical narratives, content, experience of People of

Color (e.g., King, 2018; Howard, 2004; Martell & Stevens, 2017; Tyson, 2003). Chandler

(2015) argues that many per-service teachers not only lack historical content knowledge, they also lack the pedagogy – the know-how – to teach about issues of race and racism.

As a result, Chandler (2015) moves to bring together the notion of pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986) and CRT (Ladson Billings, 2009) to help preservice teachers with their “working racial knowledge” – what he terms Racial-Pedagogical-Content

Knowledge (RPCK) (p. 5).

Moreover, other studies reveal that Teachers of Color ground their practices in their racialized, gendered, and classed experiences and utilize critical race notions as a part of their pedagogy (e.g., Rodríguez, 2018; Salinas et al., 2016). Lynn (2004) defines

Critical Race Pedagogy (CRP) “as an analysis of racial, ethnic, and gender subordination in education that relies mostly upon the perceptions, experiences and counterhegemonic practices of educators of color” (p. 154). While this is a challenging task, the ultimate 78

goal of a CRP approach to praxis is to provide an avenue for field to drive the narratives and experiences of those who have been “othered” from the margins to the center, disrupting the overwhelming presence of Whiteness and move the field towards an anti- racist project (King & Chandler, 2016). Thus, when taking CRT approach to social studies education, race and racism become central starting points of analysis for studying groups who have been historically marginalized. This study looked out towards the narratives and experiences placed at the margins in order to adjust the distorted gaze of the official curriculum. In sum, CRT provided a framework for me to understand the pedagogy and curricular decisions of Teachers of Color who utilize Hip Hop as a disruptive pedagogy.

CRT methodology Educational research often marginalizes People of Color. To attend to this marginalization, Solórzano and Yosso (2002) utilize CRT as a part of a critical race methodology to unsettle deficit notions of People of Color found within “objective” research. They root their approach the research process by:

• foregrounding race and racism in all aspects of the research process; • challenging the traditional research paradigms, texts, and theories used to explain the experiences of people of color; • providing a liberatory or transformative solution to racial, gender, and class marginalization; • focusing on the intersectional experiences of Students of Color; • using an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge.

This method of research aids in the identification and naming of racism and provides a

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space for People of Color to voice their experiences causing a rupture in the dominant discourse. In other words, the use of CRT in research works to create counter-stories that resists the distortions and silences of People of Color within majoritarian stories

(Fránquiz et al., 2011; Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).

This study utilized CRT as lens because its tenets gave me the tools needed to analyze the ways my participants situate race and understandings of systemic inequality within their classrooms. Additionally, the thick descriptions and interviews of case study research “not only serve illuminative purposes but also can be used to document institutional as well as overt racism[,] [and] the interviewing process can be pulled together to create narratives that can be used to build a case against racially biased officials or discriminatory practices” (Parker & Lynn, 2002, p. 11). As a critical case study (Cannella et al., 2016; Thomas, 2016), this research also worked to center and describe the intersectional knowledge and experiences of Teachers of Color highlight the power their stories and practices. Thus, the notion of counter-storytelling (Delgado, 2013;

Solórzano & Yosso, 2001) will be particularly useful when examining the pedagogical practices of the Teachers of Color as their stories, experiences, and knowledge are often framed absent their ways of being, knowing, and voicing.

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Counter-storytelling

Illustration 2: Zooming in on From Harlem with Love: A Mural Project for Yuri & Malcolm – Malcolm X, Yuri Kochiyama, and their words.

The desires to hear and tell stories is part of our need to understand and see the world. Dominant groups often create the most prevalent stories told within society to the benefit of their ingroup (Delgado, 1989). These stories are what call scholars call majoritarian stories (Fránquiz et al., 2011) and they work to “privilege[] Whites, men, the middle and/or upper class and heterosexuals by naming these social locations as natural or normative points of reference” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 28). Moreover, these stories interject meaning not only upon the people in power, but also upon the people who have been marginalized (Delgado, 2013). By functioning as a destructive force that challenges these dominant suppositions, critical storytelling works to uproot these understandings (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017).

Counter-storytelling is defined as “a method of telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told (i.e., those on the margins of society)[,] … [and] a 81

tool for exposing, analyzing, and challenging the majoritarian stories of racial privilege”

(Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 32). CRT took-up counter-storytelling methodology for several purposes. The first being that counter-stories “can build community among those at the margins of society by putting a human and familiar face to education theory and practice” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001, p. 475) and providing People of Color way to voice/name their own reality (Delgado & Stefancic, 1993; Ladson-Billings & Tate,

1995). Second, counter-stories work to “expose structures as simultaneously oppressive, marginalizing, and enabling” (Brayboy & Chin, 2019, p. 52). Third, counter-stories make the invisible visible by disrupting the normative discourses of Whiteness “to reframe the tale, flip the script” (Leonardo, 2013, p. 20) in a transformative way (Solórzano &

Delgado Bernal, 2001).

These stories derive from personal experiences and narratives told from oppressed peoples and passed down in official and unofficial ways (Yosso, 2006). In social studies, because these stories are perceived as inaccurate or inconsequential, they go unrecognized, resulting in the distortion or erasure of the narratives of People of Color within the curriculum (Swartz, 1992; Wills, 2001). This results in a field where,

the very discipline we call history is about the cultural narrative that cultures, nations, and societies tell, particularly about themselves … [that] reflect a perspective or point of view and underscore what the teller, audience, society, and/or those in power believe to be important, significant, and many times valorizing and ethnocentric” (Ladson-Billings, 2013, pp. 41-42).

Counter-storytelling acts to challenge these presuppositions.

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Counter-narratives are a tool utilized as a curriculum act that works to disrupt the dominant narrative in social studies (Salinas & Sullivan, 2007). These narratives offer a critical and alternative perspective to the “official” curriculum, highlighting the histories and experiences of people who have been historically marginalized through the use of critical historical thinking (Salinas & Castro, 2010; Salinas et al., 2012) and employing counter-stories to center the voices of communities sidelined by the curriculum (Fránquiz et al., 2011; Milner & Howard, 2013; Salinas et al., 2016). In this sense, counter-narrative storytelling “can lead to transformative understandings of the past and present”

(Rodríguez, 2018, p. 556) because it awakens the voices of people silenced by their orientation as “losers” or victims within the curriculum, and provides a more nuanced social, political, and economic account of the storied past and present.

It is important to note, however, that counter-stories can fall prey to the notion of

“empathic fallacy” (Delgado 1997; Delgado & Stefancic 2017). This is the idea that “one can change a narrative by merely offering another, better one” (Delgado & Stefancic,

2017, p. 34). It is a type of false empathy where “counterstories delivered in the spirit of changing hearts and minds and playing on good will” become “absorbed into the masternarrative” (Vaught, 2011, p. 19). Thus, it is important to engage in authentic counter-storytelling which is “not merely an effort at reversing the masternarratives by promoting an oppositional or opposing worldview”, but an effort to stand in opposition to them (Vaught, 2011, p.19).

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Hip Hop aims at authentic counter-storytelling through a wholesale disruption of the dominant narrative that resists the normative worldview, as demonstrated by the sections of street art in Illustration 2. Spotlighted in the mural are Malcolm X and Yuri

Kochiyama, historical figures whose stories and work are often distorted or omitted within the official curriculum. Malcolm X – offered up in the curriculum as the radical opposite of Martin Luther King – and Yuri Kochiyama – one of the many women and

Asian American activists omitted from the curriculum altogether – occupy the public space of wall with their words/voices centered. Put together by the community, the selection of these figures and words acts as civic counter-story that resist dominant notions of action and community while also speaking to a unique form of Hip-Hop culture. And while not a pure form of resistance, Hip-Hop “functions … as a counter- story or more explicitly as a counter-curriculum” that “challenges the myths, presuppositions, and supposed wisdom of the official curriculum – as it is raced, gendered, classed, and sexualized” (Baszile, 2009, p.13).

Thus, for this study, I used of counter-stories or -narratives as a framework to examine the type of stories my participants incorporated within their curriculum, and how these stories of impacted the ways Teachers of Color and students understand the dominant narratives within social studies.

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Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP)

Illustration 3: Painting From Harlem with Love: A Mural Project for Yuri & Malcolm – the local community comes together to help paint the mural.

The structure of schooling in its ideological purpose, curriculum, and teaching often asks students, particularly Students of Color, to cast aside their culture in favor of hegemonic notions of cultural norms – white, cisgender, middle/upper-class men (Apple,

2004). When Students of Color fail to succeed under this schooling structure, the lack of academic success is blamed on cultural deficits within their homes (Brown, 2016;

Valenzuela, 1999). However, during the 1990’s and into the twenty-first century, as a generation of Hiphoppas (KRS-ONE, 2009, p. 76) entered the classroom, aspects of the urban youth culture came with them (Akom, 2009).

Existing in direct opposition to the dominant schooling structure, Hip Hop would struggle to find its place within schools (Akom, 2009), even as the educational 85

community recognized its growing influence (Hill, 2009). As a result, much of the scholarly work done about young Hiphoppas in education takes place outside of the

“traditional” schooling space and day (e.g., Dimitriadis, 2009; Hill, 2009; Love, 2012). If

Hip Hop is positioned outside everyday schooling, young people who participate in the culture are unable engage the curriculum of schools in the ways they have come to know and see the world. Akom (2009) developed the instructional strategy of Critical Hip Hop

Pedagogy (CHHP) as a way to operationalize Hip Hop’s more liberatory practices in the classroom.

Drawing on notions of critical consciousness Freire’s (2000/2010), youth participatory action research (YPAR) (Cammarota & Fine, 2008), and CRT (Ladson-

Billings & Tate, 1995), CHHP aims to center people who have been historically marginalized by providing a transformative education where young people interrogate the nature of systemic oppression (Akom, 2009). CHHP consists of eleven fundamental elements that guide the praxis:

• It is driven by youth and requires their participation. • It is a collective project that engages students in a research process where everyone contributes equally. • It centers race, racism, gender, and other points of difference in its inquiry. • It helps teachers focus on intersectional issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality within Communities of Color. • It challenges the traditional paradigms of research and writing to engage in a discourse on People of Color that is informed by their actual conditions and experiences. • It is committed to the fluid movement between co-learning and co- teaching. • It is trans-disciplinary, drawing on different areas of critical studies - race, class, gender, and queer studies. 86

• It is committed to helping local communities identify and solve problems. • It is empowering. • It seeks a balance between thinking, reflection, analysis, and action. • It emphasizes a union of mind, body, and spirit. (Akom, 2009)

These elements work together to create a “pedagogical space [where] resilienc[e] and resistance can be developed [to] challenge[] the dominant mindset, increase[] academic engagement and achievement, and build[] new understandings of the strength and assets of [Y]outh of [C]olor and the communities from which they come” (p. 57). In social studies, where the master narrative often goes unchecked (Brown & Brown, 2015),

CHHP may acts as a counter-hegemonic force and speaks to how Hip Hop may be taken up in a critical way.

Cultural practices such as Hip Hop live and breathe in the bodies that enact the culture, and these bodies cannot detach themselves from practices engrained in their style, talk, and knowledge (Alim & Paris, 2017). Hence, exemplified through a cultural and community practice, Hip Hop is a form critical praxis embodied by many young

People of Color to challenge the oppressive nature of schools. In other words, CHHP, symbolized in practice by Illustration 1 and Illustration 3 – the community coming together to construct a piece of street art that educates and honors the voices of those who call for justice and the end of oppression, looks to upend power structures and bring about critical consciousness. It was a useful lens for this study as it provided a way to analyze the pedagogy of Teachers of Color and their alignment with critical

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approaches/praxes. I also allowed me to examine the ways Hip Hop functioned as a disruptive and critical pedagogical practice in social studies.

Intersectionality

Illustration 4: Intersectional zoom in on From Harlem with Love: A Mural Project for Yuri & Malcolm – Yuri Kochiyama, Malcolm X, and Black Lives Matter protestors.

Collins and Bilge (2016) define intersectionality, exemplified in Illustration 4, as

“a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences” (p. 25) which are “generally shaped by many factors in diverse and mutually influencing ways” (p.2). While Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) is recognized as the scholar who coined the term academically, historically, various social movements have worked to call out the failure of larger political and social structures to recognize the existence of multifaceted conditions that reside in people’s lives. For example, in 1977, the Combahee River Collective (2014) published a statement on Black feminism noting

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that the genesis of contemporary Black feminism was to continue the work of their foremothers, by struggling against the forces of oppression they faced as members of two marginalized groups – African Americans and women. This collective of women issued a statement that examined the ways race, class, and sexuality impact their lives as women.

Indigenous/Native (e.g., Smith, 2009; Ritfkin, 2011), Asian-American (e.g.,

Chow, 1987; Lim & Tsutakawa, 1989), and Chicana and Latina (e.g., Blackwell, 2001;

Anzaldúa, 1987) women engaged in similar work by analyzing the connections between the ways they were raced, classed, and sexualized through their own distinct histories and experiences (Collins & Bilge, 2016). Thus, Women of Color have continually sought to make clear the complex nature of their social, political, and individual conditions as we can hardly understand the systemic oppression of these women through a singular lens

(Collins, 2000).

Moreover, when intersectionality is employed as analytical tool, it gives people the ability to assess social, political, and individual experiences from multiple angles of identity and social contexts (Collins & Bilge, 2016). Harris and Leonardo (2018) note that this happens in three ways: first, “intersectionality calls attention to the social identities that are consistently treated as marginal or invisible”; second, it “points to the complex nature of power” thereby illuminating the essence of systemic oppression; third, it calls attention to the gap between how we are categorized socially and the complexity of our lived experiences (p. 5). An intersectional analysis of Illustration 4 would note that centered are the intersectional identities of a Black man, an Asian-American woman, 89

and Black Lives Matter protesters. It would illuminate the ability of intersectional theory to push back against dominant power structures (hooks, 2015a), and elucidate the role of allyship (Harris & Leonardo, 2018). Finally, it would note that the intergenerational activism displayed in the mural demonstrates a history of social movements tied to

People of Color from various complex backgrounds, histories, and genders.

As an analytical framework used in education, intersectionality works for a variety of purposes. Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) bring intersectionality to the field through CRT and used it to explore the relationship between race and property while other scholars use it to examine things like disciplinary policies (e.g., Parker & Stovall,

2004) and teacher education (e.g., Milner, 2010). In this study, the frame of intersectionality was used to consider the many axes of my participants experiences and knowledge and the ways their varied identities impact and overlap with each other. As

Teachers of Color who engage in Hip Hop, it is important to note that Hip Hop

“negotiates…tensions and intersectional[]” identity and resists static notions of identity ascribed by the dominant culture (Baszile, 2009, p. 15). As such, this study explored the intersectional resistance of these teacher’s praxis.

Bringing the framework together These theories to work together through interlocking notions of justice, power and systemic oppression, and the need to bring the histories and lived experiences of people who have been historically marginalized to the forefront (represented through Illustration

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1). Furthermore, this framework’s emphasis on resistance and voice were critical to my analysis. Thus, I utilized these lenses – CRT, CHHP, and intersectionality – to focus my understanding on how and why Teachers of Color take up Hip Hop as a disruptive pedagogy in the Social Studies.

RESEARCHER POSITIONALITY As researchers, it is important to understand the intentions, assumptions, and knowledge that drive our research (Crotty, 1998). In my position as Black woman researcher, I come to the research as someone who perceives all knowledge and meaningful reality as “contingent upon human practices, being constructed in and out of interaction between human beings and their world, and developed and transmitted within an essentially social context” (Crotty, 1998, p. 42). From this constructionist viewpoint

(Crotty, 1998), I see truth and meaning as neither objective or subjective, but rather constructed in relation what is known, and what comes to be understood, about ourselves, others, and structures, as we move through the world. The intersectionality (Crenshaw,

1989) of my identity, as it is racialized and gendered, also means that I understand and see the world from a “unique angle of vision” that is different from dominant notions of knowledge and truth (Collins, 2000/2009, p. 43).

Moreover, as a heteronormative, middle-class, cis-gender Black woman, I have a unique truth and knowledge that I try to address through the ways I research as a Black feminist qualitative researcher. This type of research:

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begins with reflections on [my] own lived experiences and brings those insights into the research process. [I do] not claim to be an expert on a particular research topic or subject; however, [I do] view [my] own observations of this social world just as significant to the research process as that of other researchers and other participants in the research process[,] … [and I] challenge[] the perception that research is or needs to be conclusively objective [while] alternatively presuppos[ing] that all scientific claims are subjective. (Evans-Winters, 2019, p. 20)

Thus, as a Black woman who taught social studies in an urban high school for eleven years, I have been both an accomplice and an adversary to an oppressive curriculum and schooling structure. I have experienced what is like not to know my histories or see myself until after I have left the PK-12 space; my ontological stance recognizes that much of what we believe about the world exists in shades of gray – the complexity of subjectivity.

These unique truths and experiences, based in the historical roots of Black feminist thought, locate knowledge at the intersections of “culturally constructed socializations of race, gender, and other identities and the historical and contemporary contexts of oppression and resistance for African American women” – what Dillard

(2000) terms endarkened feminist epistemology (p. 662). Working from this epistemological stance, I understand that “all research is social construction and a cultural endeavor”, and that the work I do, in concert with the community/participants I am working with, speaks to the what I believe is the purpose of my research (Dillard, 2000, p. 662) which is to center the work of diverse and marginalized individuals and

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communities – a goal of Black feminist who do qualitative research (see Evans-Winters,

2019).

Alongside my identification as a Black feminist is my identification as someone who is a part of a generation that grew up with Hip Hop, which makes me, as Morgan

(1999) writes, “the daughter of feminist privilege”. While not a Hip Hop head in the truest sense, I have had to learn and study the history and culture, I engage and identify with much of Hip Hop culture. As a beneficiary of this privilege, I have been able to prioritize and celebrate the freedom of myself and other women, while Hip Hop has given me a way to make sense of the world and turn-up10. This demonstrates, as Cooper et al. (2017) explains, how:

Hip-Hop reshapes the terrain of Black feminism, making it responsive to the political and cultural realities of women and girls born in the late twentieth century. And Black feminism reshapes the landscape of hip hop, pushing it to realize and elevate its political promise and possibility. (p. 171)

When thinking about my research, I recognize that I have been influenced by, and benefited from, both forms of knowing and being, and I therefore bring these two identities together as a “Hip Hop feminist” (Peoples, 2007).

10 As theorized by Cooper, the phrase turn-up “is both a moment and a call, both a verb and a noun. It is both anticipatory and complete. It is thricely incantation, invitation, and inculcation. To Live. To Move. To Have - as in to possess - one’s being. The turn up is process, posture, and performance - as in when 2Chainz says “I walk in, then I turn up” or Soulja Boy says, “Hop up in the morning, turn my swag on.” Yet it holds within it the potential for authenticity beyond the merely performative. It points to an alternative register of expression, that turns up to be the most authentic register, because it is who we be, when we are being for ourselves and for us, and not for nobody else, especially them” (as cited by Davis, 2014). 93

I also acknowledge that these identities are central to my worldview and influence how I see and understand the work and words of my participants. Thus, I come to this study with a reflexive understanding of how my identity may position me as an insider, in terms of my time spent in the classroom, race, and my love for Hip Hop, and possibly as an outsider, in terms of my years of experience in the classroom, my time spent in academia, and my gender (in the case of the male participants) (Banks, 1998; Merriam &

Tisdell, 2016). Yet, I also understand that my position as a researcher in relation to my participants is dynamic and fluid as knowledge and knowledge production shifts throughout the research (Dillard, 2000). As a result, I feel that it is my duty to make sure that the research I do represents the communities I am in, in the most truthful way. I plan to do that by highlighting their voices and asking them what they would like to contribute to the work in – whether they write or draw something or ask me to say something. Also,

I think it is important to stay connected to my participants even after completing the research process. I hope that by acknowledging how I am and centering my participants I create a reciprocal relationship.

In summary, both Black feminism and Hip Hop emerge from a unique communal truth and understanding which has worked to contend with and resist power, yet I recognize the role white patriarchal power has played in the oppression of Black women

(and other people of color) and acted as a force of problematic commodification in Hip

Hop culture. Through my work here, I looked to expose how power and resistance operates within communities (the community of Teachers of Color), Hip Hop culture, and 94

the social studies classroom. I also carry my identities into my approach to research, as I considered the questions I asked while I looked to address issues important to me as a

Black woman and lover of Hip Hop. I approach my research acknowledging the role power plays in our perspectives, and I seek to highlight the injustices that operate through power and “call current ideology into question, and initiate action, in the cause for social justice” by taking on a critical approach to research (Crotty, 1998, p. 157). As a Black feminist researcher, I see the possibilities to change the structures of injustice and I hope that the work I do highlights these possibilities. Through my work I aim to offer an alternative way, a way to be subversive and disruptive, to envision a social studies classroom that works to construct a critical consciousness (Freire, 2000/2010) and attends to inequity.

QUALITATIVE CASE STUDY RESEARCH METHODOLOGY Merriam and Tisdell (2016) explain that “the overall purposes of qualitative research [emphasis added] are to achieve an understanding of how people make sense out of their lives, delineate the process (rather than the outcome or product) of meaning- making, and describe how people interpret what they experience” (p. 15). This research methodology allows researchers to focus on how participants understand, describe, voice, and make sense of a concept or process. Due to the nature of the questions asked, centralized focus on the participants and community was necessary to capture a holistic picture of what I observed. Thus, the ability of qualitative research to help paint a portrait

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made it the appropriate methodology for my research, as this methodology allows me to capture the voice of my participants and a picture of their classrooms.

RESEARCH DESIGN Qualitative research is comprised of various research designs, one of which is case study. Thomas (2016) describes case study as an “analyses of persons, events, decisions, periods, projects, policies, institutions or other systems which are studied holistically … [and where] the case that is the subject of inquiry … illuminate[s] and explicate[s] some analytical theme, or object” (p. 23). Defined by their singularity, as knowledge gained from each subject of study is unique to the boundaries and limits that frame the case, case studies enable researchers to construct rich pictures of the subject being probed (Thomas, 2016).

More specifically, I utilized a critical case study approach (Thomas, 2016). While literature critiques the use of case study as a Black feminist researcher (Canenella et al.,

2015), as a young scholar exploring which methods work best for my research, I came to critical case study. The coronavirus pandemic also limited access to schools and the time

I could spend there, and critical case study approach allowed me to work through these difficulties. Case study does allow for interpretative inquiry, an approach to research that seeks to acquire in-depth understanding of the subject or case (Thomas, 2016). Also, as

Thomas (2018) notes, interpretative studies utilize fluid and flexible theories or

“conceptual frameworks” to “help [the researcher] think about and understand the subject

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in hand” (p. 150). This type of inquiry provides me with a lens to interpret and understand what informs my participants’ pedagogical praxis, and how they incorporate

Hip Hop culture and Hip Hop’s educational practices in a social studies classroom as a disruptive tool.

In addition, through purposeful sampling (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016), I will be observing my participants using a constant comparative method. The constant comparative method is “defined by the simple principle of going through data again and again (this is the constant bit), comparing each element … with all of the other elements

(this is the comparative bit)” to see what themes emerge that capture the essence of your data or study (Thomas, 2016, pp. 204-205). This method can help create a larger picture and story which will help me provide a richer and more extensive picture of the practices of Teachers of Color in the field of Social Studies Education (SSE).

RESEARCH CONTEXT The context of this study took place at five different campuses in and around large urban spaces in Texas. Two of the five campus were a part of the same district, Mid-City

Independent School District (MCISD), in a large city, Mid-City11. MCISD is the primary district in the city and surrounding areas. While the district is comprised of predominately

Latina/o(x) students, of the nearly 7,000 teachers in MCISD, the vast majority were white

(57.5%).

11 All city, campus, and district names are pseudonyms. 97

The third campus, also located in Mid-City, is part of the Texas public charter system with open enrollment – Southeast Schools. According to the state recording/reporting agency, Southeast Schools are comprised of a student population that predominately Latina/o(x) and teacher population that is predominately white. A fourth campus is located in a suburban district right outside of Mid-City, Eastside Independent

School District (EISD). EISD is smaller in comparison to MCISD, but the demographics are similar. EISD is a district where most of the students are Latina/o(x) and greater demographic diversity amongst the teacher and administrative population than MCISD.

The fifth campus is part of a large urban school district, Southside Independent School

District (SISD), hours away from Mid-City. Most of the student in SISD are Latina/o(x) and the teacher population consist of predominately Black/African American and

Latina/o(x) teachers.

RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS

Recruitment The teachers in this study were purposefully selected (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) based on their identification as Teachers of Color who participate in Hip Hop culture. Of the five participants, three were in-service teachers with 1-4 years of experience and two were preservice teachers in their final semester of their Professional Development

Sequence or PDS. Four of the participants were students in one of the methods classes I taught as an instructor. During their respective times in my class, following lessons

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around disruptive pedagogies and Hip Hop’s educational practices, my participants would express interest in further discussions and strategies for use in their classrooms. I then followed these teachers along their trajectory into the field and student teaching.

Beginning in the fall of 2019, I began asking the them if they would be willing to participate in this study. I met the fifth participant through social media. I learned of her use of Hip Hop in the classroom, and I started working with her in the spring of 2020.

Participant backgrounds/characteristics12 As stated in the previous subsections, the following participants were purposefully selected based on the parameters of race, location/accessibility, and their participation in Hip Hop culture. The name below are pseudonyms chosen by each participant. I asked them to select names of Hip Hop artist that inspired them and matched their gender identification, so the campus names reflect an aspect of that artist’s life or career (see Appendix A, Table 1).

In-Service Teachers

T. Brown

T. Brown was in her fourth-year teaching eighth grade U.S. History when the study began and was promoted to an administrative-level position in the fall of 2020.

Born and raised by her very religious mother in California, she discovered Hip Hop through R&B and Kirk Franklin. After finishing college, T. Brown became certified to

12 All participant names are pseudonyms. 99

teach through an alternative certification program. Upon completion of her certification program, T. Brown she began working at Freeman Middle School in SISD where she discovered she had not received adequate training on how to work with her multilingual students. After discovering that her students listened to rap music, T. Brown used Hip

Hop to engage her students and build their academic skills.

Megan Pete Megan identifies a Black woman and was in her second-year teaching when this study began. A self-described “military brat” who moved around the country often,

Megan went to high school in the Southwest region of the country, left to attended a four- year university on the East Coast, and then returned to the Southwest to be closer to her family and work on her graduate degree. After simultaneously receiving her master’s degree and teaching certificate, Coach Pete, as her students and colleagues call her, teaches U.S. History, sociology, and psychology, and coaches basketball and track, at

Philly Tech High School, a magnet high school in EISD. A teacher who believes in adding complexity to the dominant historical narrative by centering knowledge and experiences not often found within the curriculum, Megan’s love of Hip Hop emerges from the fun of listening to music with her friends when she was younger and its ability to get her in the zone for a game.

Antonio Ocasio Antonio identifies as a queer Latino man and was in his first-year teaching. Born in Texas and raised in a northeastern suburb outside of Mid-City, Antonio grew up in a 100

conservative community. Hip Hop gave him an outlet and a way to express himself, as he is a passionate spoken word artist. Antonio holds a bachelor’s degree from the State

University and is certified in secondary English/Language Arts and Reading. After graduating from an urban education program that centers social justice, Travis works at

Southeast Sci-Tech Middle School, a 6-8 campus a part of Southside Schools. Teaching an elective in Hip Hop History which examines Hip Hop culture and the social, political, and economic context from which the culture emerged, entitled ASTROWORLD. Antonio states that he steeps his pedagogy in critical and justice-oriented approaches.

Preservice Teachers

Cordae Dunston Cordae identifies as a Black man and was student teaching in his final semester as an undergraduate in an urban education program at State University. Cordae was born in

Texas and much of the Hip Hop that has influenced him is a product of the large city where he grew up. As an intern at a MCISD middle school that is approximately 55% white, Cordae stated that he wanted to make the lessons in his Texas History placement more engaging and critical. Part of the way he worked to refashion this curriculum was to plan lessons that utilized Hip Hop.

Destiny Gutiérrez Destiny identifies as a Latina and a Texan. A student teaching in her final semester as an undergraduate in an urban education program at State University, Destiny

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taught Ethnic Studies and was able to engage students in projects that center community problem solving and activist work. Destiny loves art and sees Hip Hop as an extension of artistic expression. She is particularly drawn to lyricism and therefore has a deep appreciation for conscious rap, and as a history major who has worked on large archival projects, Destiny is committed to being a critical social justice teacher.

DATA COLLECTION Data for this study was collected during the spring and fall of 2020. Merriam et al.

(2011) argues that “all researchers begin data collection with certain assumptions about the phenomenon being investigated, situations to be observed, and people to be interviewed” (p. 406). These assumptions spring from my lived experiences and impact how I interpret and see data. As a Black feminist researcher, whose experiences are filtered through the lenses of my Blackness, woman-ness, middle-class background, the

Hip Hop culture (specifically the music) that I grew-up with, and my eleven years as a classroom teacher in Texas,

it is essential to turn outside of institutionalized knowledge and pivot toward alternative texts (i.e., data sources) for the examination of social phenomenon, relationships, and cultural contexts. … [This means that] everyday taken-for- granted images, symbols, artifacts, gestures, and languages serve as reflections of human behavior and relationships; thus, all of the aforementioned plus many more cultural practices can inform social scientist about social and cultural conditions. (Evans-Winters, 2019, pp. 24-25)

Understanding this, it is important to recognize that data in this study can take on many forms like spoken word writing and reflections, informal music recommendations, and

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dress code. These cultural practices speak to the ways my participants construct Hip Hop and disruptive practices in the classroom and are valuable texts to be analyzed. Data for this study was collected and analyzed during the spring and fall of 2020.

Interviews As a researcher, I am the primary instrument of data collection which means that I have a responsibility to the community I am studying. Furthermore, in my interactions with this community, I am both an influencer and someone who can be influenced

(Dillard, 2000). Thus, in the collection of my data it was imperative that I create a dialogic space within the community for the subjects of my case to appear (Dillard, 2000) and their voices to be heard. Interviews open up the space of this dialogic conversation to take place and are necessary because we cannot observe what someone is thinking or

“how people interpret the world around them” (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016, p. 108). This source of knowledge will be important in understanding why and how my participants use Hip Hop culture in their classrooms and to what ends.

There were three interviews 30 minutes to an hour long interviews – a pre- observation interview examined my first research question and two post-observation interviews following the first and any subsequent observations. These interviews were semi-structured, which allowed me to be more flexible, but still include predetermined questions (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). This type of interview structure worked best for me because it makes the interview feel more like a conversation, and a conversational feel

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makes the interview feel less formal and more relaxed. During the second interview, I asked follow-up questions to the first interview, and debriefed classroom observations.

The final interview was also used to debrief classroom observations but served primarily to member-check previous interviews.

Classroom observations Doing fieldwork is a critical part of the qualitative research process because the field is where data and evidence is collected (Thomas, 2016). Observations are a type of data collection done in the field undertaken in two ways – structured and unstructured

(Thomas, 2016). Structured observations occur when “you watch for particular kinds of behaviors” and actions; unstructured observations happen when the researcher is “in the situation, take part [in the environment], [and] record and watch from within” (Thomas,

2016, p. 197). Researchers should be more open in early observations as those initial impressions drive subsequent observations (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). As a result, my early observations took on a more unstructured form.

Furthermore, in the field there exists a relationship between the researcher and research subjects that depends on the stance of the researcher. Gold (1958) submits four possible research stances: first, the complete participant, where the researcher is total immersed in the field and a member of the studied group; second, the participant as observer, where the researcher engages in activities that have been disclosed to the studied group while also working as an active participant; third, the observer as

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participant, where the researchers active participation in the study comes second to collecting data; and fourth, the complete observer, where the researcher is only in the field as an observer (as cited in Merriam & Tisdell, 2016, pp. 144-145). As a researcher I believe that while my voice is important in the research process, it will always come second to the voices of my participant. Thus, I actively worked with my participants as a participant observer.

In conclusion, this study also included three to four structured and unstructured classroom observations, which included audio recorded. In addition to audio, I also viewed video recorded classroom lessons as the coronavirus shutdown access to classrooms. Written field notes were taken in a journal and include sketches of the classroom, student and teacher quotes, the layout/position of people in the classroom, classroom activities, and my own reflective comments. In the case of video recorded lessons, when the total classroom was not in view, I took notes about what I could hear and see within the field of the camera.

Artifacts Merriam and Tisdell (2016) define artifacts as “objects in the environment that represent some form of communication that is meaningful to the participants and/or setting” (p. 162). Some the artifacts I collected include student work, teacher notes or pictures. I also collected PowerPoints used during lessons, teacher and student reflections, and my own reflective observation data. All artifacts gathered were stripped

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of identifying markers and securely stored in electronic folders. By bringing together artifact data and the data collected from interviews, I was able to craft a detailed picture of my participants classrooms and their instructional practices.

DATA ANALYSIS After each interview was conducted, I begun the process of pre-coding “by circling, highlighting, bolding, underlining, or coloring rich or significant participant quotes or passages that strike [me]” (Saldaña, 2016, p. 20). As more data was collected, I continued to organize interview transcripts and teacher and student artifacts into codes using the data analysis software tool Dedoose. Then, I conducted one-way data analysis, by combing through the data, attaching codes and making interpretations to make it an active process (Graue, 1998). I also took at a daughtering lens to the data analysis by acknowledging and processing the dynamic nature from which the data emerged (Evans-

Winter, 2019).

To code the data, I collected and labeled those codes in the Dedoose software by examining them for patterns that recurred, and memoing my thoughts as I moved through the work. I then looked for threads in the data – “interpretative elements that the researcher weaves through events and images in the fieldwork to provide a coherent way of thinking about the topic” (Graue, 1998, p. 163) – cycling codes to classify, prioritize, integrate, and synthesize data and build theory (Saldaña, 2016, p. 69). Moreover, my theoretical framework acted as a lens from which I extracted external codes from the

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data, and internal codes came from “issues that [came] up within the reading of the data”

(Graue, 1998, p. 163). Finally, I crystallized the data (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) by noting patterns and themes that arose in the comparison of the interviews, observations, and artifact data, and provided examples.

Trustworthiness Traditional qualitative work has long rejected the positivistic notions of internal validity, external validity, reliability, and objectivity. Instead it has promoted the ideals of trustworthiness in order to make “reasonable claims to methodological soundness” and quell attacks from the positivistic research community (Erlandson et al., 1993, 131).

Furthermore,

If intellectual inquiry is to have an impact on human knowledge, either by adding to an overall body of knowledge or by solving a particular problem, it must guarantee some measure of credibility about what it has inquired, must communicate in a manner that will enable application by its intended audience, and must enable its audience to check on its findings and the inquiry process by which the findings were obtained. (Erlandson, et al., 1993, p. 28)

My work also sought to make sense of my participants’ experiences by drafting a rich picture of their knowledge and work as teachers, but if I only used one piece of data to understand those experience and constructed that picture, issues of trustworthiness/creditability might emerge. Erlandson et al. (1993) note there are four areas of trustworthiness common to a qualitative research – credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability, which are achieved through prolonged engsagement, persistent observation, triangulation (now crystallization) (Tracy, 2010), peer debriefing,

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member checking, thick descriptions, purposive sampling, reflexive journaling, and more

(Merriam, 2009). Each of these helps ensure that the researcher is accurately portraying their participants experiences, remaining cognizant of their experiences and voice.

Therefore, my data collection included a variety of texts and I used to crystalize my data. Richardson states that crystallization is different from triangulation in that it recognizes that we can interpret data from more than three fixed angles of reference (as cited in Merriam & Tisdell, 2016), a notion that speaks to endarkened feminist epistemology. Tracy (2010) explains that the goal of crystallization is not to provide researchers with a more valid singular truth, but to open up a more complex, in-depth, but thoroughly partial understanding of an issue” (p. 844). This happens because “crystals are prisms that reflect externalities and refract within themselves, creating different colors, patterns, and arrays casting off in different directions” (Merriam & Tisdell, p. 246). Thus, how we make sense of the data depends on the angle of understanding and response. This also means that member checking was important to ensure that I had appropriately represented my participants’ voices, in my responsibility to the community I where I conducted research. As a result, I approached the analysis of my data through these varied angles and employ member checks.

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PART II: THE PRODUCT

The following sections of this dissertation address the three interrelated research questions (Chapter 4, 5, and 6) that supported the project inquiry.

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Chapter 4: Why Hip Hop matters in social studies (An ode to Hip Hop): Taking up disruptive pedagogies that center intersectionality and relationality

So, when did you fall in love with Hip Hop? (Famuyiwa, 2002, 0:58). The question asked at the beginning of the movie Brown Sugar becomes a motif that runs alongside a Black love story not only about two people but also about “a community and one of its greatest creations” – Hip Hop (Ngangura, 2018, para. 3). Birthed and delivered from a tradition of Blackness (Perry, 2004), the question prompts Hip Hop’s collective members to consider their first time experiencing the music and culture. When asked to a group of real-life music artists in the early credits of the movie, the question evokes memories of Hip Hop’s past. Artists like Black Thought, Common, De La Soul, Kool G

Rap, and Pete Rock recall standing on a block watching B-boys and B-girls pop and move on basketball courts, setting up turntables and mics for parties, or hearing Eric B. Is

President, Rapper’s Delight, and an Afrika Bambaataa and Afrika Islam show for the first time.

When the Black and Latina/o(x) social studies teachers in this qualitative critical case study engaged with the opening question, moments of remembrance were sparked about time spent with family, shared experiences with others, and hearing the biting lyrics of Hip Hop artists from other generations like Lil Wayne and Tupac for the first time. In each recollection, whether rap artist or teacher, there is a pause, a smile, and a pitch of excitement that speaks to temporally engrained memories rooted in and connected to place, identity, joy, and a civic sense of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006). 110

To belong is to be in a community with others and feel seen and understood.

Undoubtedly, the mandated social studies curriculum (and consequently citizenship education) lacks this shared sense of belonging as it normalizes dominant and oppressive geographic, historic, economic, and civic narratives by centering white middle/upper- class, cisgender men and their civic understandings and knowledge (e.g., An, 2016;

Busey & Walker, 2017; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; King & Chandler, 2016). Rose (1994) argues that,

oppressed people use language, dance, and music to mock those in power, express rage, and produce fantasies of subversion … [which] produce communal bases of knowledge about social conditions, communal interpretations of them, and quite often serve as cultural glue that fosters communal resistance. (pp. 99-100)

For many marginalized peoples, Hip Hop is the communal language and practice they use to de/reconstruct dominant civic discourses. Unlike social studies, Hip Hop resists curricular narrative and civic-ness connected to Whiteness and master narratives (Baszile,

2009). Hip Hop, through its shifting cultural practices, “marks a democratic space” that makes room for voices, knowledge, and choice thought to be “taboo” or outside the norm

(Perry, 2004, p. 6), while providing those voices a civic identity, agency, and membership.

For Communities of Color and other marginalized communities, the social studies fails to recognize their complex lived experiences and histories consequently displacing them from the larger civic narrative. Teachers of Color tasked with teaching this curriculum are keenly aware/conscious of the social studies shortcomings (e.g.,

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Rodriguez, 2018; Salinas & Castro, 2010; Vickery, 2015) and often reject the constraints of the official (Au et al., 2016) or technical curriculum (Cornbleth, 1985) in favor of more critical pedagogical approaches (e.g., Duncan, 2019; Milner, 2012; Magill &

Salinas, 2019). These approaches include disruptive pedagogies, or,

pedagogical practices which disrupt normalizing discourse[s] in order to provide the space for [what Giroux (1992a) calls] ‘a language of possibility’ (p. 204)[.] … [This] disruption of normalizing discourses enables challenges to be to the legitimacy of schools processes which produce and reproduce oppressive relations of power (Mills, 1997, pp. 35-36).

In the social studies, Teachers of Color who enact disruptive pedagogies both expose the problematic nature of the narrative as a deliberate act of racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia, and act to nuance, complicate, or counter a narrative so that a more inclusive civic-ness emerges.

Regardless of several meta studies describing the importance of Teachers of Color

(e.g., Quiocho & Rios, 2000; Villegas & Davis, 2008), there is still much to learn about

Teachers of Color who engage these pedagogies in social studies (e.g., Salinas & Blevins,

2013; Vickery, 2016). More specifically, while much of the work on Hip Hop in education resides in the fields of STEM (e.g., Adjapong, 2017, 2021; Emdin, 2011, 2013) and literacy (e.g., Hallman, 2009; Hill, 2009; Wakefield, 2006), for Black and Latina/o(x) social studies teachers, who developed a kind of love of Hip Hop connected to their past, present, and emerging identities as social studies teachers, the literature is scant (Childs,

2014; Kumar, 2016; Stovall, 2006, 2013).

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In this project, I extend the work on Teachers of Color in social studies and Hip

Hop pedagogy. I examine why five social studies classroom teachers – two who identify as Latina/o(x) and three who identify as Black – take up Hip Hop culture as a disruptive pedagogy. Utilizing intersectionality (Collins & Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1989) and

Critical Hip-Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) (Akom, 2009) as interwoven lenses, first, I found the embodied experiences of Black and Latina/o(x) teachers in the world, and as a part of the Hip Hop community, furthered their recognition of culture as an oppositional force to the structural inequality in schools and curriculum. Second, these teachers’ experiences with Hip Hop grounded their epistemological understandings of the culture resulting in a layered and intimate knowledge of the various possibilities/avenues for Hip Hop as a disruptive pedagogy in their social studies classrooms. Third, as a result, of those deep- rooted lived experiences and understandings, I ultimately explain that the Black and

Latina/o(x) teachers in this study insert and take up Hip Hop as a part of their desire to challenge the dominant discourses in social studies and act as change agents within their schools. Throughout this paper, I draw on the movie Brown Sugar as a way to frame my discussion of these teachers.

WHY TEACHERS OF COLOR MATTER Even as public schools have become increasingly linguistically and culturally diverse, the teacher workforce is still marked by the overwhelming presence of white women (NCES, 2017). This growing reality is tied to a “democratic imperative”

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(Haycock, 2001) and has led to pleas and efforts to hire and retain more Teachers of

Color (Achinstein & Ogawa, 2012; Villegas & Irvine, 2010). This “democratic imperative” claims that the educational system fails to serve the needs of Students of

Color when they are unable to see and interact teachers who look like them (Achinstein

& Ogawa, 2012; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Villegas & Geist, 2008). Supported by a body literature that illustrates the benefits of their presence in the classroom, studies note that

Teachers of Color connect, engage, nurture, and hold high expectations for Students of

Color (e.g., Achinsten et al., 2010, Brown, 2014). The knowledge of teachers of color is necessary within education and research because it acknowledges that there exist

“another voice, another reality” that understands and sees the needs of their students differently from their white peers (Delpit, 1986, p. 384).

Inclusivity and a sense of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006) necessitate a pluralistic democracy, and for Students of Color, this feeling comes from seeing teachers who look like them in positions of power within schools. Therefore, it is necessary that we study

Teachers of Color, their experiences, and their practices. Given the purposefully selected teachers in this project, it is important to explore what is generally known about African

American/Black and Latina/o(x) teachers.

Research on African American/Black teachers The practices of Black teachers are rooted in a long history of resistance (e.g.,

Foster, 1997; Walker, 2000; Williams, 2005) and a commitment to community tied to

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notions of racial uplift and care. Research demonstrates that this resistance starts with the knowledge that as Black people they must operate in a system that has attempted to deny

Black people access to an education (Gundaker, 2007) and rejects their cultural knowledge (e.g., Delpit, 1995; Walker, 2001). This cultural knowledge resists white ways of knowing and teaching because as Gordon (1985) notes:

African American cultural knowledge itself can be uniquely emancipatory for African Americans – because it is born out of the African American community’s historic common struggle and resistance against the various oppressive effects of capitalism and racism which have kept them in a subordinate position in American position. (p. 7)

Thus, resistant cultural knowledge is at the core of Black teacher pedagogies because

Black teachers operate with the knowledge that their work will be tied to the constant need to push back against a schooling system dominated by Whiteness and the need to implement practices that are critical, varied, and wide-reaching (e.g., Brown, 2011; Lynn,

2002).

Various studies have also detailed the ways in which Black women enact a kind of familial pedagogy tied to Black feminist/womanist ideas in the form of “other- mothering” (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2005; Dixson & Dingus, 2008; Foster, 1993). The practice of “other-mothering” centers around the belief that there is a shared responsibility to care for and advocate for students (Collins, 2000/2009). Additionally, leaving aside the performative nature of characterizations and pedagogical practices of

Black male teachers (Brown, 2009), research describes adherence to pedagogies of experience (Brown, 2011) and humanizing approaches in order to improve the 115

educational and social conditions of their students and to uplift their communities (ross et al., 2016).

The growing body of literature on Black teachers in social studies demonstrates the ways these teachers push back against traditional notions of citizenship (Pang &

Gibson, 2001; Vickery, 2017b), challenge the racism that exists in their schools and traditional notions of the curriculum (Duncan, 2019; Milner, 2012), and engage in culturally relevant pedagogies (Ladson-Billings, 1995). For example, in a study of two teachers, Vickery (2015) found that African American women reconstructed citizenship education by using counter-narratives and making lessons relevant to students. Duncan

(2019) describes the emancipatory pedagogies Black teachers engage in to disrupt the racism of their white colleagues in schools. However, there needs to be more work on

Black teachers who engage in disruptive pedagogies in social studies.

Research on Latina/o(x) Much of the work on Latina/o(x) Teachers of Color is situated in elementary bilingual education (e.g., Flores & Rosa, 2015; Sánchez & Ek, 2009). Rooted in their personal experiences as bilingual speakers whose language was cruelly denied, Latinx bilingual teachers work as “cultural guardians” (Flores, 2017) and advocate for bilingual education rights (Espinosa, 2015). For instance, Fránquiz et al. (2013) conclude

Latina/o(x) bilingual classroom teachers view and act on behalf of their students and communities with a heightened awareness of the macro political terrain that has

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consistently used language as a proxy for racism (see DeNicolo & Fránquiz, 2006). In another project, Fránquiz et al. (2011) examine how bilingual Latinx teachers resist majoritarian tales (see Delgado, 2013) in developing their understanding of bilingual education policies, practice, and contexts. This body of work emphasizes Latina/o(x) teachers’ funds of knowledge (Gonzalez et al, 1995), borderlands identities (Anzaldúa,

1987), Chicana epistemologies and kitchen pedagogies (Delgado Bernal, 1998), Latino

Critical Race Theory (Solórzano, 1997), and/or community cultural wealth (Yosso,

2006). These sociocultural and critical lenses bring to the forefront the experiences, understandings, and commitments of Latinx teachers and emphasize the more deliberate and ideological intent of teaching (Flores, 2017). In sum, this research illuminates the ways Latina/o(x) teachers come to know and read the world and utilize their specialized knowledge to inform their praxis.

Finally, in social studies, the literature regarding Latina/o(x) teachers attends to the ways these teachers utilize their epistemological understandings to counter and reconstruct the dominant historical narratives and traditional notions of citizenship. For example, Latina/o(x) teachers locate their approaches to teaching history in their personal and cultural biographies (Salinas & Castro, 2010), and their historical positioning at the margins of the curriculum (Salinas & Sullivan, 2007). As a result, they critique and disrupt the flawed traditional curriculum by presenting alternative sources and constructing a nuanced narrative of history. In related work regarding citizenship education and Latina/o(x) teachers, Salinas et al. (2016) found that Latinx teachers were 117

able to create counter-narratives or stories via LatCrit. As members of the ‘outgroup’,

Latina/o(x) preservice bilingual education teachers “have a conscious understanding and collection of stories that serve to strengthen the group and disrupt the ideology that seems fair and justifies the positioning of the dominant and outgroup’s place in the narrative”

(para. 45). Studies conclude that Latina/o(x) teachers recognize “ideological understandings and pedagogical practices that acknowledge Latinas/os’ citizenship is intimately tied to culture” (Salinas et al., 2016, p. 332). This body of work seeks to help raise consciousness and challenge dominant notions of civic identity, agency, and membership (Salinas et al., 2016).

THE OFFICIAL NARRATIVE AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF CITIZENSHIP All too often the teaching of the social studies, and inherently citizenship education, advances an unblemished narrative celebrating America’s greatness and the themes of progress and individual triumph (Cohn, 2008; Loewen, 2007). The American imagination of “a shining city upon a hill”, a melting pot where all immigrants are welcome, and the American Dream that is within reach for everyone who arrives on her shores are official ‘nation building’ portraits and narratives that are presented through the teaching of history, geography, and economics. Accordingly, Trouillot (1995/2005) notes that the hands and minds behind the “nation-building” mechanism of social studies have had the fundamental power to define the American narrative. Thus, in its attempt to craft a narrative of national “we-ness” the curriculum “usually follows the work of the

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powerful and leaves the powerless invisible and unexamined … often [by] cover[ing] up or steriliz[ing] national disgraces in an effort to produce patriotic citizens” (Nelson &

Pang, 2014, p. 217).

For a multiethnic and racial society with people of varying religious, economic, and immigration backgrounds, this white centric narrative ignores the pluralistic nature of

American democracy, and marginalizes the civic stories (Martell & Stevens, 2017), knowledge, and understandings of people who do not identify with the official curriculum narrative. Instead, narratives of implicit and explicit racism (e.g., King, 2014;

Ladson-Billings, 2003; Rodríguez, 2017; Salinas et al., 2016; Tyson, 2001), classism

(e.g., King & Finley, 2015; Shanks, 2017; Vickery et al., 2015), sexism (e.g., Levstik &

Groth, 2002; Winslow, 2013), and heteronormativity (e.g., Camicia, 2017; Loutzenheiser,

2003) exist within the social studies standards, curriculum, textbooks, and other curricular resources.

As a result, a growing body of work by Vickery (2016, 2017b), Johnson (2019),

Rodríguez (2018), Rains (2003), and Salinas and Blevins (2013) reveal the ways Black,

Asian American, Indigenous, and Latina/o(x) social studies educators, respectively, utilize their lived experiences and the personal narratives to disrupt the official curriculum and center the voices of People of Color. These scholars also advanced the more critical notions of citizenship by identifying the fundamental flaws of the official curriculum, introducing disruptive pedagogies, and furthering a narrative that is inclusive

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of the identity, agency, and membership of Communities of Color (e.g., Salinas et al.,

2018).

Hip Hop acts as disruptive/counter cultural text where people, particularly people from communities that have been disenfranchised, “construct, sustain, and maintain notions of self, history, and community” (Dimitriadis, 2009, p. 7) and shape their identities. As Teachers of Color who engage in Hip-Hop, it is important to note that Hip-

Hop “negotiates…tensions and intersectional[]” identity and resists static notions of identity ascribed by the dominant culture (Baszile, 2009, p. 15). Thus, for Communities and Teachers of Color, Hip Hop acts as a way to make sense of dynamic and complex identities and speaks to the type of kinship (or similarity) that exists between the powerful lyrics and rhythm and the complexities of intersectionality (Collins & Bilge,

2016). As a result, this paper draws on the notion of intersectionality to understand the role identity, Hip Hop, and praxis play in the decision to take up Hip Hop culture in the social studies classroom.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK To examine the stances Teachers of Color in the social studies adopt in taking up

Hip Hop as a disruptive pedagogy, I frame this critical case study through the complexity of identity and intersectionality, and Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy. If one considers the importance of deepening our understanding of Teachers of Color and the problematic nature of the narrative often embedded within the teaching of the social studies and

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citizenship education, then examining why Teachers of Color take up Hip Hop is the next essential question to extend the field.

Intersectionality As Banks (1998) notes, our biographical experiences and interpretation of these experiences greatly influence how we come to know, construct, and see the world. For

People of Color, these experiences and interpretations are filtered through the interwoven lenses of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and citizenship, and their socio-political and cultural contexts. These lived social and cultural experiences work to construct not only their personal identities but also how they see themselves professionally (Quiocho &

Rios, 2000). As a result, Teachers of Color often enter social studies classroom spaces with intimate knowledge of the inequity and exclusion characteristic of curriculum, pedagogy, and schooling (e.g., Duncan, 2019; Rodriguez, 2018; Salinas & Castro, 2010;

Vickery, 2014).

Commonly understood as a theory of identity taken up by Women of Color,

Collins and Bilge (2016) define intersectionality, coined academically by Crenshaw

(1989), as “a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences” (p. 25) which are “generally shaped by many factors in diverse and mutually influencing ways” (p.2). When employed as an analytical tool, intersectionality enables the examination of social, political, and individual and collective experiences from multiple angles of identity and social contexts (Collins, 2000; Collins &

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Bilge, 2016). Harris and Leonardo (2018) note that this happens in three ways: first,

“intersectionality calls attention to the social identities that are consistently treated as marginal or invisible”; second, it “points to the complex nature of power” thereby illuminating the essence of systemic oppression; third, it calls attention to the gap between how we are categorized socially and the complexity of our lived experiences (p.

5).

Furthermore, the utilization of intersectionality as a tool acts as a form of critical inquiry that examines “relationality, power relations, and social justice” (Collins & Bilge,

2016, p. 83). Applied in an expansive way, intersectionality works to call out the failure of larger political and social structures to recognize the existence of multifaceted conditions that reside in people’s lives. Thus, critical analysis of identity permits intersectionality and Hip Hop to come into dialog with each other.

Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) The second component of this framework concerns the praxis of Critical Hip Hop

Pedagogy (CHHP) outlined by Akom (2009). Drawing on notions of critical pedagogy

(Freire, 2000/2010), the inquiry that comes from youth participatory action research

(YPAR) (Cammarota, & Fine, 2008; Minkler, 2004), and the basic core tenets of CRT

(Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001), CHHP centers marginalized voices by providing a transformative education where young people interrogate the nature of systemic

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oppression (Akom, 2009). CHHP consists of eleven fundamental elements that guide the praxis (Akom, 2009):

• It is driven by youth requiring their participation. • It is collective. • It centers race, racism, gender, and other points of difference in its inquiry. • It helps teachers focus on intersectional issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other social differences within Communities of Color. • It challenges the traditional paradigms of research and writing by engaging in a discourse on People of Color informed by their actual conditions and experiences. • It is committed to the fluid movement between co-learning and co-teaching. • It is trans-disciplinary, drawing on different areas of critical studies – race, class, gender, and queer studies. It is committed to helping local communities identify and solve challenges within their communities. • It is empowering. • It seeks a balance between thinking, reflection, analysis, and action. • It emphasizes a union of mind, body, and spirit.

These elements work together to create a “pedagogical space [where] resilienc[e] and resistance can be developed [to] challenge[] the dominant mindset, increase[] academic engagement and achievement, and build[] new understandings of the strength and assets of [Y]outh of [C]olor and the communities from which they come” (Akom,

2009, p. 57). For the purposes of this work, CHHP’s attention to intersectional issues will be particularly useful when examining the perceptions of the Black and Latina/o(x) teachers in this study.

CHHP “foregrounds race and racism and their intersectionality with other forms of oppression” and helps Teachers of Color identify and make sense of the societal and systemic problems within schools. In social studies, where the master narrative often goes

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unchecked (Brown & Brown, 2015), CHHP acts as a counter-hegemonic force and speaks to how Hip Hop may be inserted in the classroom in a critical way. Thus, it is a useful lens for this study as it provides a way to analyze the pedagogy of Teachers of

Color and their alignment with critical approaches/praxes and examine the ways they understand Hip Hop as a disruptive and critical pedagogical practice in social studies.

METHOD OF INQUIRY This study utilized a critical qualitative case study design (Merriam, 2014;

Thomas, 2016) to explore the ways Teachers of Color illuminate power and uproot/challenge narratives within the social studies curriculum through the disruptive pedagogical practice of CHHP. Thomas (2016) defines case study as an “analyses of persons, events, decisions, periods, projects, policies, institutions or other systems which are studied holistically” (p. 23). The goal of critical research is “to critique and challenge, to transform and empower” (p. 34). As a critical researcher, who engages in Black feminist qualitative inquiry, it also is important to acknowledge that my critiques are shaped by my personal and shared experiences, and that in my position as a researcher the work I do in collaboration with my participants should “breathe life into the study of society and culture” (Evans-Winter, 2019, p. 21). Furthermore, it is important to be cognizant of the words used to describe the community and those being researched, and mindful of my positionality in relation to my participants.

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Research context The context of this study took place at five different campuses in, and around, large urban school spaces in a Southwestern state (city and district names are pseudonyms). While the teachers worked on different campuses with distinct teacher and student demographics, all but one school has a student population that is predominately comprised of Students of Color, particularly Latina/o(x) students. Two of the five campuses are in the same district, Mid-City Independent School District (MCISD)

(pseudonym), in a large urban city, Mid-City (pseudonym). MCISD is the primary district in the city with a student population comprised of primarily Latina/o(x) students.

The preservice teachers were located at a middle school and high school within the district. One of the participants was also located in Mid-City, but at a campus classified as a public charter system with open enrollment – Southeast Schools

(pseudonym). According to the state reporting agency, much like MCISD, Southeast

Schools are comprised of a student population that is predominately Latina/o(x) and a teacher population that is predominately white. The fourth campus in this study is located in a suburb right outside of Mid-City, Eastside (pseudonym). The district, Eastside

Independent School District (EISD), is smaller in comparison to MCISD, but the demographics are similar. EISD is a district where most of the students are Latina/o(x) and the teacher population is predominately white. Lastly, the fifth campus is located in a large urban city, South Side (pseudonym), in the district of South Side Independent

School District (pseudonym). The district is primarily comprised of Students of Color,

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where Latina/o(x) student make up the majority of the student population (see Appendix

A, Table 1).

Participants The teachers in this study were purposefully selected (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) based on their identification as Teachers of Color who participate in Hip Hop culture. Of the five participants, three are in-service teachers with 1-4 years of experience and two are preservice teachers in their final semester of their Professional Development

Sequence (PDS). Four of the participants were students in social studies and sociocultural methods courses where I served as the instructor. During their respective times in my class, following class sessions around disrupting pedagogies and Hip-Hop’s educational practices, my participants would express added interest in further discussions and strategies for use in their classrooms. I then followed these teachers along their trajectory into the field and student teaching.

Beginning in the fall of 2019, I began asking these four teachers if they would be willing to participate in this study. I was introduced to my fifth participant through social media. From the relationship we established online, I learned of her use of Hip Hop in the classroom and I began working with her in the spring of 2020. In the section below, I discuss the participants in detail and I include their “generation” as it was important for me to situate where they enter into the timeline of Hip Hop, particularly when thinking about the types of Hip Hop they engage.

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Megan Pete (pseudonym) is a Millennial who identifies as a Black woman and was in her second-year teaching. A self-described “military brat” who moved around the country often, Megan went to high school in the southwest region of the country, left to attend a four-year university on the East Coast, and then returned to the Southwest to be closer to her family and work on her graduate degree. After simultaneously receiving her master’s degree and teaching certificate, Coach Pete teaches U.S. History, sociology, and psychology, and coaches basketball and track at Philly Tech High School (pseudonym), a magnet high school in EISD. A teacher who believes in adding complexity to the dominant historical narrative by centering knowledge and experiences not often found within the curriculum, Megan’s love of Hip Hop emerged from the fun of listening to music with her friends when she was younger and its ability to get her in the zone for a game as a student athlete.

T. Brown (pseudonym) is also Millennial who identifies as a Black woman and was in her fourth-year teaching before being promoted to an administrative position in the fall of 2020. T. Brown was born and raised by her mother in California. T. Brown’s mother was a religious woman who introduced her daughter to Hip Hop through R&B music and Kirk Franklin. Her mother “worked really hard to ensure that [she] went to the best schools”, but those schools were predominantly white so after high school T. Brown attended an HBCU (Historically Black College and University) before transferring to another college in the South where she received a degree in counseling. T. Brown was certified through an alternative certification program where she believed she did not 127

receive adequate training on how to work with her multilingual students. After discovering that her students engaged in Hip Hop culture, T. Brown used Hip Hop to engage her students and further their second language acquisition.

Antonio Ocasio (pseudonym) is a part of Generation Z, identifies as a gay Latino, and was in his first-year teaching. Born in Texas and raised in a northeastern suburb outside of Mid-City, Antonio grew up in a conservative community. Hip Hop gave him an outlet and a way to express himself, as he is a passionate spoken word artist. Antonio holds a bachelor’s degree from the State University and is certified in secondary

English/Language Arts and Reading. After graduating from an urban education program that centers social justice, Antonio works at Southeast Sci-Tech Middle School, a grade

6-8 campus of Southeast Schools. Teaching an elective in Hip Hop History, entitled

ASTROWORLD, which examines Hip Hop culture and the social, political, and economic context from which the culture emerged. Antonio states that he steeps his pedagogy in critical and justice-oriented approaches.

Cordae Dunston (pseudonym) identifies as a Black man and was a student teaching in his final semester as an undergraduate in an urban education program at State

University. Cordae, a member of Generation Z, was born in Texas and much of the Hip

Hop that has influenced him is a product of the large city where he grew up. Currently an intern in a MCISD middle school, he wanted to make the lessons in his State History placement more engaging and critical. Part of the way he worked to refashion this curriculum was to plan lessons that utilized Hip Hop. 128

Destiny Gutiérrez (pseudonym) identifies as a Latina and a Texan. As a student teaching in her final semester as an undergraduate in an urban education program at State

University, EG teaches Ethnic Studies and has been able to engage students in projects that center community problem solving and activist work. Destiny loves art and sees Hip

Hop as an extension of artistic expression. She is particularly drawn to lyricism and therefore has a deep appreciation for conscious rap, and as a history major who has worked on large archival projects, Destiny is committed to being a critical social justice teacher.

Researcher positionality As a heterosexual, middle-class, cisgender Black woman, I have a unique truth and knowledge that I try to address through the ways I research as a Black feminist qualitative researcher. This type of research:

begins with reflections on [my] own lived experiences and brings those insights into the research process. [I do] not claim to be an expert on a particular research topic or subject; however, [I do] view [my] own observations of this social world just as significant to the research process as that of other researchers and other participants in the research process[,] … [and I] challenge[] the perception that research is or needs to be conclusively objective [while] alternatively presuppos[ing] that all scientific claims are subjective. (Evans-Winters, 2019, p. 20)

Thus, as a Black woman who taught social studies in an urban high school for eleven years, I have been both an accomplice and an adversary to an oppressive curriculum and schooling structure. I have experienced what it is like not to know my histories or see

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myself until after I left the PK-12 space; my ontological stance recognizes that much of what we believe about the world exists in shades of gray – the complexity of subjectivity.

These unique truths and experiences, based in the historical roots of Black feminist thought, locate knowledge at the intersections of “culturally constructed socializations of race, gender, and other identities and the historical and contemporary contexts of oppression and resistance for African American women” – what Dillard

(2000) terms endarkened feminist epistemology (p. 662). Working from this epistemological stance, I understand that “all research is social construction and a cultural endeavor”, and that the work I do, in concert with the community/participants I am working with, speaks to the what I believe is the purpose of my research (Dillard, 2000, p. 662) which is to center the work of diverse and marginalized individuals and communities – a goal of Black feminists who do qualitative research (see Evans-Winters,

2019).

Data collection Data sources included semi-structured interviews, student and participant artifacts, and classroom observations and field notes collected in the spring and fall of

2020. Additionally, data sources included spoken word writing and reflections, informal music recommendations, dress codes, and participant generated podcast discussions.

These cultural practices speak to the ways my participants construct Hip Hop and disruptive practices in the classroom and are valuable texts to be analyzed.

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There were three semi-structured interviews, which allowed me to be more flexible, but still include predetermined questions (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The goal of these interviews was to first get a better understanding of my participants’ backgrounds to see how their complex identities and lived experiences shaped their knowledge of social studies and Hip Hop. Second, these interviews served as debriefings to classroom observations and lesson plans, and follow-ups to clarify answers to questions from the previous interviews. The final interview acted primarily to member-check what was said in previous interviews.

There were three structured and unstructured classroom observations, which were audio recorded. In addition to audio, some of the lessons were video recorded as access to the physical classroom was prohibited during the coronavirus pandemic. During these observations, written field notes were taken in a journal and include sketches of the classroom, student and teacher quotes, classroom activities, and my own reflective comments.

Merriam and Tisdell (2016) define artifacts as “objects in the environment that represent some form of communication that is meaningful to the participants and/or setting” (p. 162). Some of the artifacts I collected included teacher notes and pictures,

PowerPoints used during lessons, teacher and student reflections, and my own reflective observation data. Additionally, lesson plans were examined alongside the classroom observation and classroom resources.

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Data analysis Data was coded and analyzed for emerging themes using the analytic software

Dedoose. During initial coding, I drew on the theories of intersectionality and CHHP to identify codes and manually highlighted words and phrases that spoke to my research question and conceptual framework within Dedoose. I then looked for threads in the data

– “interpretative elements that the researcher weaves through events and images in the fieldwork to provide a coherent way of thinking about the topic” (Graue, 1998, p. 163) – cycling codes to classify, prioritize, integrate, and synthesize data and build theory

(Saldaña, 2016, p. 69). For example, the notion of Hip Hop and familial influence showed up in interviews, participant reflective journals, and participant artifacts and as I began to think about these codes in relation to the conceptual framework and data those codes fell into the theme of embodiment. I then used Dedoose to organize and visualize my codes and themes.

AN ODE TO HIP HOP13: EMERGING THEMES Through its varied cultural forms (Hill & Petchauer, 2013) and performativity

(Dimitiadis, 2009), Hip Hop engages in a disruptive pedagogical practice that informs or

“schools” (Guillory, 2005) us about the ways members of the culture make their way through the world. In this critical case study, I seek to illuminate the critical knowledge and voice of five teachers who are Hip Hop players. Data analysis of interviews,

13 Reference lyrics to Erykah Badu’s song “Love of my Life (An Ode to Hip Hop)”, a song found on the soundtrack of Brown Sugar 132

classroom observations, and participant artifacts revealed three themes. First, shaped by familial connections, the Black and Latina/o(x) teachers in this study embody Hip-Hop culture in the ways they see, think, move about, and understand the world. In essence, their understanding, knowledge, and participation in Hip-Hop culture was essential to who they “grew up to be”, both in the world and as teachers. Second, the depth and personal importance of the participants’ understanding of the inherent purpose of Hip

Hop created a “fluency” that deepened their understandings of the use, context, and temporal contours of the genre. Third, their epistemological understandings of Hip Hop and its history enables them to envision themselves as disruptive agents or “prophets of change”. While discussing these themes I will reference quotes and lyrics from the soundtrack of Brown Sugar, as a starting point to begin understanding the relationship between Hip Hop and the studied participants.

Embodiment “I was gon be dealin’ with Hip Hop whether I wanted to or not. It was like a forced marriage; it was predetermined.” – Black Thought

Black Thought, in his response to the question grounding this project’s efforts,

“when did you fall in love with Hip Hop,” reveals how he defines and sees Hip Hop. For him, Hip Hop is more than performative practice; it is a cultural artform irrevocably linked to who he is as a person and how he constitutes himself in the world. As Walcott

(1999) notes “those who have taken up ‘citizenship’ in the hip-hop nation feel that [] references to their personal and collective histories, cultures, memories, desires, needs,

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pleasures and disappointments [are] expressed and narrated by [Hip Hops’ artists]” (p.

101). Hip Hop is therefore a critical standpoint from which the culture’s participants navigate the world. In other words, Hip Hop and identity weave and merge themselves together in a type of unavoidable union. Like Black Thought, the participants through interviews, lessons, and instructional practices revealed the interwoven nature between

Hip Hop culture and their identities. Made visible or tangible in their thinking, layered understandings, and use of Hip Hop culture, the Black and Latina/o(x) teachers in this study embodied Hip-Hop culture in their consideration and use of Hip-Hop as a disruptive pedagogy.

This notion of embodiment can be seen in the participants responses to the same question asked at the beginning of Brown Sugar (and to Black Thought) – “So, when did you fall in love with Hip Hop?” – which I asked to get a sense of where and how my participants came to know, define, and participate in Hip-Hop culture. Cordae took a beat to think,

When I was in child, my mom she used to listen to a lot of R&B, a lot of old school...what songs am I thinking about? Salt-N-Pepa, TLC, Double Dutch Bus, Usher, and they have a lot of Hip Hop influence. Then, you know, you play it at parties, you play it at family reunions, you play it, you know…when you're in love. So, I fell in love with Hip Hop, at a young age and the love just kind of grew.

Cordae’s responses to the question showed the depth and importance of his memory as it was sketched in Hip Hop. Hip Hop was ever present in the time spent with his mother and at family gatherings; it was a thread weaved throughout his childhood. Cordae was

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not alone in how his love for Hip Hop came to be. Antonio notes a time in the car with his sister:

I think I can't give you a specific time, but it was somewhere in my sister's car. Riding with her when we would go to Huntsville – she went to Sam Houston [University] – so we would take three-hour trips. She would play burned CD after burned CD… a lot of Ja Rule, a lot of Ashanti and Destiny's Child, and then slowly began working its way into more rap or Hip Hop…[Then] once the Carter III came out, 2008, that's when I was like, "Okay…!"

Here Antonio articulates that the rhythms of Hip Hop, the particulars of artists and a growing knowledge of the genre, were woven into time spent with family. For Antonio it was his sister’s knowing and sharing of Hip Hop until he could call Hip Hop his own.

Cordae’s and Antonio’s replies revealed that embodiment is familial, and the layers of embodiment stretched into those visceral connections and moments that participants made between Hip Hop and their families.

Each informant shared an early and familial connection that was joyful. Megan vividly recalled,

Dang, I was young. And my dad had came home from some type of deployment...He was like, "Let's go to the store”… My dad was gone a lot when I was younger, so it was almost like I didn't know him. I just don't remember really knowing him… And we get in the car, this silver Honda with an orange license plate on the front with Martin Luther King's picture on it. It's just me and him, he rolled all the windows down, and he's driving, and he blasts the music. Just blasting the music! He's also rapping along, I don't remember what, but I know the music was loud, and I'm sitting in the car just like, "Who is this? Who are you?" I had just never seen him act like that. And I remember seeing him bopping his head and I'm just like, "Oh my God, look at my dad...I’ve never seen him like this before."…I said, "That's going to be me. I'm going to be riding round, pumping music with the windows down.”

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Megan, like Cordae and Antonio, communed with family through Hip Hop, but also considered how Hip Hop would continue in her life. Thus, the sum of their embodiment of Hip Hop was a sort of cultural soundtrack.

Like a soundtrack that scores a movie, Hip Hop connected to or signified specific moments in time that tracked alongside my participants’ lives while also becoming a site of familial/gathered knowledge. As shown in their responses, Hip Hop was ever present or connected to memories of parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Yet, Hip Hop not only marked ardent/warm time spent in community with family, it also marked moments of knowledge transfer that would help to shape their understandings of the culture.

These experiences with Hip Hop also ran alongside their experiences in the world and schools as people who exist at the intersections of marginalized identities.

Experiences that included tracking, disengagement, and a feeling of erasure from the curriculum. Thus, much like Black and Brown teachers who connect their understandings of the world through time spent learning from parents at the kitchen table (i.e., “kitchen table pedagogies”, Delgado-Bernal, 2001), trips to the barbershops (e.g., Douglas &

Peck, 2013), and at the knees of mothers combing their hair (i.e., “daughtering”, Evans-

Winters, 2019), these teachers' experiences listening to Hip Hop with family ran up against their experiences in schools and acted as a type of knowledge acquisition that helped them formulate how to take up Hip Hop culture and situate it in the classroom.

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Furthermore, garnered from these familial/kinship sites of knowledge, the participants’ complex and interlocking understandings of Hip Hop culture acted as a lens from which they came to see and know the world. For example, Antonio and Cordae are spoken-word artists. Spoken word is a form of poetry and Hip Hop when set to a rhythmic beat/cadence. Cordae practices spoken word to process, “When something pops up in your mind then you write it down and you keep adding on to it. So, whenever something pops into my head that I’m thinking about or doing at the time, I write it down…I was taking in so much so that’s how I just process.” In this instance, Cordae reveals how the Hip Hop practice of spoken word informs the way he processes the world around him and the content he teaches. Likewise, Antonio and T. Brown see any publicly visible blank canvas as a possibility for artistic expression – the forearm of skin with a tattooed piece that says, “SWAG Mindset” (SWAG standing for strong, willpower, achieves greatness) as in the case with T. Brown, and a blank circular pillar in the classroom that Antonio allowed students to write and draw graffiti art on – and act of claiming presence in a civic space. Megan uses Hip Hop vernacular to re-tell historical narratives involving women, and Destiny sees herself in and models her standpoint as a

Latina after Princess Nokia, an Afro-Indigenous and Puerto Rican artist, who disrupts master narratives of Latinas by

Incorporat[ing] different genres [in her albums] in a way that supports people who identify with sometimes contradicting cultures ... [and not doing] what mainstream culture expects from women of color.

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Combined, the participants lived experiences and epistemological understandings weave themselves into the participants’ development and praxis as classroom teachers.

This is because as Rose (1994) notes for many young people Hip Hop is their “primary cultural, sonic, and linguistic windows on the world” (p. 19). These windows are the lens through which they see teaching. In essence, these teachers embody Hip Hop culture and use the narratives they have built around Hip Hop culture to theorize about its possibilities in their classroom.

Hip Hop Fluency “It was creative, it was new, it was fresh. … Hip Hop spoke directly to me because it was, you know, speakin’ from a language that the people I was dealing with was speakin’ in.” – Talib Kweli

The participants’ acquisition of knowledge led to an intimate understanding of

Hip Hop history and context - a fluency that allowed the them to consider the intricate contours of Hip Hop. For instance, the participants demonstrated their knowledge of Hip

Hop by identifying the cultural and community practices and societal conditions that inform how Hip Hop’s elements are performed, expressed, created, and reproduced as a generative cultural artifact. In our discussions of various aspects of the culture and artists, the participants articulated an understanding that Hip Hop emerged from Black American culture (Perry, 2004) in a context of urban decay and resistance (Chang, 2005; Ewoodzie,

2017). T. Brown expressed this sentiment explaining, “[Hip Hop is] not just music though…Hip Hop is a culture, [and] now it's a universal culture between all races. Yet,

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every kid wants to be Black. That’s because it starts with our culture, right? It starts with what we bring.” Pointing back and forth between her and I, the collective “we” in her statement speaks not only to my insider status as a Black woman and former K-12 teacher who engages in Hip Hop, it demonstrates an understanding of the historical relationship between Hip Hop and Blackness as a location not readily accessible for people outside the culture.

Also revealed in the participants’ discussions of Hip Hop’s complex and dynamic compositions, each of the participants displayed their fluency by noting that Hip Hop was wrapped-up in or extended from other genres of Black music. As Antonio explains:

I consider the world of Hip-Hop to encompass a few genres. Elements of R&B elements, jazz, and all those things … The rappers of today, while the sound is definitely very different [from the past]…[Hip Hop] hasn't really changed very much. That's because once again, it's so tied to the Black experience and to marginalized communities.

In a lesson, Destiny used her knowledge of the overlapping R&B and Hip Hop elements when she used an Anderson Paak song that mixes R&B melodies and sound with Hip

Hop beats and rapping, “Lockdown”, alongside a Marvin Gaye song in her classroom to discuss the concept of civil unrest and the similarities and difference between the past and present. Love (2018) argues that misunderstandings around Hip Hop pedagogy happen when teachers, even those who participate in Hip Hop culture, have an ahistorical understanding of the struggles behind Hip Hop culture and the ways the work sprouted out of communities who wanted to be heard. Here by acknowledging Hip Hop’s use of sampling – using the sounds and compositions of other songs from soul, R&B, and funk 139

musicians to pays tribute to the “old school” or the collective memory members of the

Black community, Antonio and Destiny demonstrate deep historical understandings of

Hip Hop culture that enabled their ability to make sense and root their Hip Hop work in authentic ways despite being non-Black members of the Latina/o(x) community.

The participants also had fluent understandings of the dynamic spatial and temporal nature of Hip Hop (Perry, 2004; Rawls & Petchauer, 2020). Destiny, for example, displays her awareness of the importance of space in Hip Hop saying:

The locality of Hip Hop and how specifically it relates to geography is so interesting to me. Because Hip Hop, it’s not just a blanket genre, you can listen to a song and you can point out, ‘that’s from Atlanta or that’s from Chicago or that’s a New York rapper and you can hear it in their experiences and accents…I feel like a lot of people they hear Hip Hop and they're like, oh, it's a rap song and it's like okay, but they're from this area and they're talking about this place. They are talking about this street and very specific places. … It's like being in Houston you know, listening to UGK and listening to, like, DJ Screw and Pepsi, and like learning the history of these places through their music … people who are from these areas are so passionate about those artists and like it's crazy. And like Megan [thee Stallion], the styling, and I mean like, she reps [Houston] so hard.

By identifying the role location plays in defining and telling the stories of different urban spaces and naming Hip Hop artists associated with those locations, Destiny illuminates the ways the culture changes and is constructed differently as it moves around (e.g.,

Forman, 2002). Destiny, along with T. Brown and Cordae, also demonstrated their fluency and understanding of temporality of space and place by recognizing the ways students connect to the sounds and artists in their community and used local rappers in their classes to engage their students. These teachers made it clear that they understood

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Hip Hop’s deep connection to place and space and used this knowledge to inform the work and types of artists they used in their classrooms.

Finally, participants also demonstrated a type of temporal fluency as they discussed generational differences between the Hip Hop they are attracted to and the Hip

Hop of their students. According to the studied participants, for “old heads” – a generation of Hip Hoppas that grew up with a less commercialized and culturally dominant form of Hip Hop (Kitwana, 2002) – Hip Hop’s consciousness and politically active messages are most appealing. The teachers in this study know this history but are also of a generation that has experienced Hip Hop’s commodification, and as a result, could note the appeal and differences between each generation based on time-period and context. Antonio describes these generational differences:

The rappers that are up now [e.g., present-day] are from a different generation than the old rappers. The political contexts, the economic contexts are different. So, I think rap has infiltrated everywhere – fashion, media, and I think international ways of being and is defined and means something different to each generation.

For this reason, even though each of the studied participants did not always like the Hip

Hop music their students were into, they understood that their students Hip Hop had been informed by a different socio-political context and time and still has value. For instance,

T. Brown, who is a Millennial, centered the Hip Hop her students listened to in class because even though she did not like their music choices she recognized “it’s not about

[her]…It’s about the impact…It’s not about the vehicle we use; it’s about the destination.” As a result, even if she found no inherent value in the song “Cut It” by O.T. 141

Genasis (feat. Young Dolph), but because the kids did, she sampled the beat and instrumental in her class. Thus, the participants’ understanding of the spatial and temporal character of Hip Hop allowed them to work from what Rawls & Petchauer

(2020) note is a fuller picture of Hip-Hop that affords them the ability to conceptualize how to use Hip Hop in the classroom.

Teachers of Color as “prophets of change” “I felt like these dudes is the truth, forget everything else you heard on the radio and all that, this is it …” – Method Man

Lastly, the third theme revealed that these teachers saw themselves as “prophets of change.” A play on words inspired by Public Enemy’s “prophets of rage,” I use the phrase “prophets of change” to describe these teachers because of the desire to upend the curriculum and enact a new kind of truth in their social classrooms. Informed by their deep epistemic understandings of Hip-Hop culture and history, or what Love (2016) calls their Hip Hop sensibilities, the Black and Latina/o(x) teachers in this study operated from resistant/agentic classroom and schooling lenses. They understood that Hip Hop emerges from a place of resistance and agency, and as a result, they see Hip Hop culture as a tool that can be used to either push back against the official social studies narrative or to insert a new narrative.

By nature of the field, the social studies classroom should be a location of generative discussion or debate and community (communal performance/everyday civic).

Yet, the literature illuminates the ways many social studies classrooms are dominated by

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lecture (Loewen, 1995/2007) and narrow understandings of citizenship. As teachers, who value the voices and knowledge of their students and seek to transform the social studies classroom, Hip Hop aided their ability to create agentic and creative classroom spaces that permitted generative discussions and welcomed their students’ complex civic discourses/enactments. While each participant saw their work as a praxis meant for change, I highlight the work of Antonio as he created this sort of space in his Hip Hop history class – ASTROWORLD, and he did it in at least three ways.

First, he gave over the physical space to the students, creating a sense of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Students were able to make classroom desk arrangement decisions. Antonio put up their work on the walls to create a sense of ownership and allowed the students to use even the ceiling as an artistic canvas. Second, Antonio created a dialogic space (Freire, 2000/2010) where he and his students learned alongside each other to challenge dominant narratives. During a class that he described as “the most powerful,” Antonio and his students discussed the topic of misogyny in rap music. After exploring the different ways women are objectified in lyrics and music, the girls in

Antonio’s class lead a generative discussion addressing the ways they had experienced sexism. He noted in his journal:

I told the boys they were no longer allowed to speak for the remainder of the class; we need to understand that sometimes boys and men need to shut up and listen to women speak about their experiences of misogyny (and experiences in general). For about 15 minutes, only the girls in class spoke. They spoke of times they’ve been cat- called, times they’ve been groped, how they feel when society pressures them to appear “sexy.” It was a powerful moment for everyone in the room because for once,

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the boys were able to hear real stories of how their words and actions affect the girls and women in their lives.

Third, every other Friday, during the last 20-30 minutes of class, Antonio nurtured his student's communal knowledge and practice by allowing them to engage in Freestyle

Friday where students could create their own Hip-Hop personas and rap about whatever they wanted to address. Antonio stated in an interview that he wanted his class to act as a practice of freedom and as such he and his students uncovered silenced stories/narratives, created generative dialogue, and put their complex civic identities and discourses on display. By taking up and inserting Hip Hop – a generative and communal process

(Pardue, 2013) - in social studies spaces, students and teachers can listen and play off each other, work from a communal starting point or language, and feel at home.

Furthermore, because of Antonio’s complex Hip Hop sensibility he understood that in order to be a “prophet of change” he could not be the dominant voice or axle of the knowledge in the classroom.

DISCUSSION “It’s like that, dawg, and it sounds so nice/Hip Hop, you the love of my life” – The Roots feat. Common

Through this project, I used Critical Hip Hop and intersectionality as a lens to understanding why Black and Latina/o(x) social studies teachers take up Hip Hop as a disruptive pedagogy in the classroom. The study data results revealed the lived and embodied value of Hip Hop for the informants that resulted in a fluency and commitment

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to their roles as prophets of change. Their knowledge of Hip Hop yields at least three findings that further the importance of Hip Hop in teaching and learning in the social studies. First, I contend that Hip Hop is more than a disruptive pedagogy but rather one that is able to capture the complexity of intersectionality all too often absent from narratives taught in the social studies. Second, I argue that Hip Hop culture’s outright naming of those racist (and sexist and classist) narratives—is an overt disruption of traditional social studies curriculum that all too often serves to diminish and marginalize

Communities of Color. Third and finally, Hip Hop serves to deliberately disrupt the white gaze and instead center the lives and experiences of Communities of Color. The use of

Hip Hop as a disruptive pedagogy taken up by teachers that view the inherent significance of a Hip Hop’s elements (e.g., spoken word, graffiti, rap, and so forth), therefore merits greater attention from the field.

Hip Hop as intersectional pedagogy Unfortunately, the social studies is a field characterized by a middle/upper-class, white, heterosexual, cisgender, and male narrative (e.g., Díaz & Deroo, 2020; King,

2019; Wills, 2012). This monolithic model constructs a narrow narrative of citizenship, history, economics, and geography and consequently ignores or silences complex and intersecting identities (e.g., Vickery, 2017a) However, Hip Hop can be, as Hall (1983) notes, a cultural site “where [people] discover and play with the identifications of

[themselves], where [they] are imagined, where [they] are represented, not only to the

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audiences out there who do not get the message, but to [themselves]” (p.470). In other words, at its core, Hip Hop acts as a tool of intersectional inquiry used to disrupt normalized and essentialized identities. When inserted in social studies, Hip Hop challenges a problematic curriculum that has rejected and excluded multiple and complex identities of Communities of Color, women, and the LGBTQIA+ community.

Importantly, intersectionality is primarily thought of as a relational and analytical tool used to make sense of social, political, and economic interactions between people and the world (Crenshaw, 1989). Collins and Bilge (2016) bring intersectionality and Hip Hop culture in conversation with each other, and in doing so provide a unique “angle of vision” to understand the “identity politics of both” (p. 116). Similarly, by placing Hip-

Hop inside the social studies classroom, my participants offer a unique “angle of vision” of the social studies.

While Hip Hop is not always unproblematic and/or liberatory (Cooper et al.,

2017; Love, 2012, 2016), it is about laying claim to civic space in the public sphere. Hip

Hop does this by bringing identity inquiry into sharper view. As such, it presents Black and Brown, rich and poor, male and female and gender-nonconforming; it also presents urban and suburban, generational differences, and the West Coast and East Coast and the

Dirty South. Thus, by situating Hip Hop inside of social studies, as an intersectional tool, social studies teachers forward multiple identities in interaction with each other and with systems of power. In this messiness, Hip Hop serves as pedagogy that is not either/or but rather all-inclusive in its examination of the lived experiences of others. 146

A manifestation of pedagogies of resistance, intersectional pedagogy calls upon the lived experiences of classroom teachers and acknowledges relationality. In other words, through intersectionality we examine the intricate relationship between complex identities and systems of power, in solidarity with others. Like intersectionality, Hip Hop narrates the shared experiences of oppression and resistance and relationships founded in understanding the mechanisms of racism, sexism, and classism while also noting an agentic voice of defiance. Intersectional pedagogies bring to light all too often ignored complexities and dynamics, so when Black and Latina/o(x) teachers answer the call to trouble traditional teaching and curriculum by bringing in Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy with its intersectional focus, they are doing the relational and disruptive work of identity, power, and resistance.

Naming hooks (2015b) describes naming as “a serious process[] [that] has been of crucial concern for many individuals within oppressed groups who struggle for self-recovery, for self-determination” (p. 166). The social studies refusal to “name” is part of a larger system of intentional erasure (Paris, 2019) that permits colorblind teaching and curriculum or half-measured attempts at inclusion. Consequently, social studies teachers who take up disruptive pedagogies adhere to hook’s “serious process” of explicitly naming the -isms and phobias within the nation building curriculum.

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Hip Hop provides a space for naming by offering “counter-hegemonic authority and [judgement] to the force of white supremacy in American culture” (Perry, 2004, p.

44) as a kind of disruptive pedagogy (Mills, 1997). Even in its commodification, Hip Hop resists normative, white supremacist notions of identity, class, language, art, and performance (Dimitriadis, 2009; Perry, 2004). Thus, when Teachers of Color use Hip

Hop in social studies, they are naming or identifying the white supremacy and inequity within the curriculum. This naming deliberately and purposefully challenges the traditional school structures and master narratives of oppressed groups.

Moreover, to name something is also to empower and create (hooks, 2015b). Hip

Hop’s unapologetic and brazen nature enables the ability of historically marginalized communities to lay bare their complex identities. We can present our stories through our voices, for ourselves by ourselves. Stories centered around resilience, agency, and resistance; stories that make claims to civic identity, agency, and membership, all while calling out the problems of teaching and learning in the social studies and citizenship education (Salinas, 2006).

Beyond the white gaze Finally, in response to a question from interviewer Charlie Rose about critiques of her work because it focused primarily on the lived experiences of Black people, Toni

Morrison (1998) infamously stated:

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As though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze, and I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.

To be concerned with the “white gaze” means to operate from a framework that centers white male middle/upper-class norms. This gaze encompasses the power structures of society and those at the core of schools and education. To operate beyond the white gaze is to center and begin with the dynamic “cultural” and “heritage” practices (Paris, 2012) of Students of Color and other marginalized communities.

The origins of Hip Hop spring from a generative communal space – house parties and dance halls – and the culture is made and remade, understood and enacted through the various ways people observe and take up Hip Hop’s elements (Chang, 2005;

Ewoodzie, 2017; Hill & Petchauer, 2013). There is also the common understanding that

Hip Hop emerges from a space where insiders have access to a kind of knowledge that non-participants cannot easily obtain. Thus, Hip Hop is an example of a community cultural practice many Communities of Color and oppressed groups engage in that operates beyond the white gaze (Paris & Alim, 2014).

The Black and Latina/o(x) teachers in this study recognized the power and control of the white gaze of the social studies curriculum and classroom. They take up Hip Hop as an intersectional tool because Hip Hop in its message, cadence, vernacular, style, everything – is subversive (Rose, 1994) and intentionally resistant or unashamedly unconcerned with the white gaze. By utilizing an intersectionality alongside Hip Hop, social studies teachers also engage in a reflexive and critical approach to Hip Hop 149

pedagogy (Akom, 2009) that works to critique aspects of the culture that reify damaging hegemonic discourses around race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. In this sense, rejecting the white gaze through Hip Hop acts as a transformative classroom practice

(Paris & Alim, 2014).

Driven by an embodied sense of Hip Hop's value, an articulated fluency, and a given role as prophets of change, Hip Hop allowed the teachers in this project a disruptive, analytical tool and relational premise by which to confront the dominant social studies narrative. Hence, Hip Hop culture enacted as an intersectional pedagogy ultimately calls upon the social studies to look beyond the white gaze and consider the myriad of complex identities of historically excluded or silenced communities.

CONCLUSION “It was freedom.” – Questlove

To enter the social studies classroom as a Black and Latina/o(x) teacher is to enter an unwelcoming space. A space that works to silence and/or erase their identities. Their decision to use Hip Hop in the classroom brings “freedom,” as Questlove calls it, into the space. Hip Hop's freedom allows Black and Latina/o(x) teachers to challenge the normalizing discourse of social studies and citizenship education. Thus, this study informs social studies educators about the practices of Black and Latina/o(x) teachers and the ways Hip Hop acts as liberatory epistemology/praxis and a disruptive pedagogy.

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As a result, teacher education programs must recognize the social studies as fundamentally flawed, and then acknowledge intersectionality as one way to disrupt that.

Teacher education programs should begin looking at work that calls out social studies and examines the roots of intersectionality. Second, teacher education programs must also address the challenges of taking up Hip Hop as an intersectional tool and tend to this notion of fluency. Addressing intersectionality and Hip Hop is important particularly for white teachers who cannot embody the culture. Yet, they can engage in its practices if they have a deep respect and understanding of the culture which means doing the hard work of learning Hip Hop’s origins and the complexity around commodification and originality. In fact, all teachers who intend to use Hip Hop should study the culture from its origins to present and understand the role students play in this work. Students must be at the center of any critical Hip Hop practice. Finally, teacher education programs should try to design their programs so that all teachers envision themselves as “prophets of change”.

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Chapter 5: The revolution will not be without Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy: Disrupting traditional social studies classes

Figure 1: Schoology curriculum materials from Cordae Dunston

Yeah, generations just how long we been at war The revolution on all platforms … If racism is the cancer, Black Thought’s the answer Gotta get up off the back porch, emancipate your minds

- Black Thought (2020, verse 3)

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When Cordae Dunston began his teaching experience as a middle school social studies teacher, he was given a curriculum guide with instructional activities (lesson plans) and supporting materials that provided sanitized (e.g., VanSledright, 2008) and certainly troubling narratives of history (e.g., the Alamo as a glorious symbolic victory over Mexico), specifically Texas History (Heilig et al, 2012; Salinas et al., 2015). These curriculum materials explained that as Texas and other southern states were attempting to preserve a way of life, interference by the federal government became the driving cause of the Civil War. Depicted with a cartoon image of Texas happily waving goodbye to the rest of the country (see Figure 1), the official curriculum packages are reminiscent of empirical research that details the ways the social studies curricula ignores issues of slavery, racism, and enduring resistance by African American and white abolitionist to capture the Antebellum period (e.g., Kendi, 2016) more accurately. Unfortunately, Mr.

Dunston’s experience is just one tangible instance of how the social studies curriculum creates a perpetual and erroneous narrative that continues to marginalize the narratives of

People of Color and women.

Mr. Dunston was aware of the failure of the curriculum handed to him. He explained, “I would like them to know that the curriculum is B.S.” Curious by what he meant, I followed up by asking him why. He explained,

It's in the books, in the TEKS [Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills] ... And the lessons that focus on the dominant narrative. I don't want to say it's trash, but in my opinion, it's trash. To a teacher that's been doing this for a while, they may go by the book and say it's a good lesson. To me, I want to say it's trash. For one, it's boring. 153

There’s a one-track narrative – [Europeans] came over here, started colonization; they found gold, glory, and God, and the occasional mention that they spread diseases to natives. You always get that, and [the curriculum] just skips the reasons why. It doesn't really talk about it, or say, “Okay, so let's look at this from a different perspective”.

Mr. Dunston’s pedagogical response to what he called a “trash” curriculum was to use

Hip Hop. Hip Hop offered Mr. Dunston a different perspective that he used to deliberately push back against the dominant narrative and transform the curriculum and his students' thinking. In fact, all the participants saw Hip Hop as a different perspective – as a way to engage students in an otherwise irrelevant history, and/or counter the state adopted curriculum and narrative. Mr. Dunston saw use of Hip Hop pedagogies as a means to create a revolution within and through the social studies in the vein of what

Black Thought describes in his verse on Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power: Remix 2020,” quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The purpose of this study is to illustrate how five

Black and Latina/o(x) teachers used Hip Hop as a pedagogical and transformative tool.

Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) as frameworks, I argue that these teachers implement Hip Hop’s vocabulary, musical performance, and narratives to make social studies content more engaging and relatable to students. Primarily using rap music and videos, the Black and Latina/o(x) participants in this study utilized Hip Hop culture to make the geographic, historic, and economic narratives inherent to the teaching of the social studies more meaningful for their high school students. Second, by introducing narratives and voices often absent within the curriculum, these teachers enacted Hip Hop as pedagogical practice to challenge the 154

long-standing exclusion and marginalization of Communities of Color, women,

LGBTQIA+ individuals, and people who experience poverty. While some teachers worked towards engagement and academic success, others worked towards the broader goals of disruption and transformation of the dominant narrative of the curriculum.

Through their stances, these teachers reconstruct/innovate the ways we think about teaching social studies. In order to transform the field while utilizing Hip-Hop, as in any critical pedagogical practice, teachers must work to expose power.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Black/African American and Latina/o(x) teachers The Black and Latina/o(x) teachers in this project demonstrated the ways

Teachers of Color work to challenge social studies curriculum that has cast their complex identities to the margins.

The pedagogical practices of Latina/o(x) and Black teachers are rooted in their experiences with a schooling structure that has rejected their linguistic and cultural knowledge. Fráquiz, Salazar, and De Nicolo (2011) document the ways in which bilingual Latina teachers confront, unpack, and defy majoritarian tales. An emerging body of work establishes a relationship between those experiences common to the

Latina/o/x community and Latina/o/x teacher’s commitments to transformative teaching

(Flores, 2017). Similar findings have emphasized the link between Black/African

American teachers and their home communities. The communal work of Black teachers

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is tied to their raced and intersectional experiences and the desire to create transformative and nurturing schooling spaces (e.g., Duncan, 2019; Guyton et al, 1996; Knight, 2011;

Milner, 2016). Brown’s (2014) meta-analysis of preservice Teachers of Color reveals that for a community of teachers who live at the intersections of race, class, and gender humanizing and transformative teaching is ultimately the goal.

The research on Latina/o(x) teachers describes their lived experiences and ideological stances, and the ways the two intersect to influence their pedagogical practices (e.g., Espinoza, 2015). In the social studies, scholars have worked to show that

Latina/o(x) teachers root their practices in pushing back against traditional notions of citizenship and their own marginalization within the curriculum (e.g., Debach et al.,

2018). In general this body of work makes apparent an “ideological understanding and pedagogical practices that acknowledge Latinas/os’ citizenship is intimately tied to culture” (Salinas et al., 2016, p. 332). For Latina/o(x) teachers and teacher educators raising a consciousness and challenging dominant notions of civic identity, agency and membership is immutable. Studies regarding the teaching and learning experience of

Latina/o(x) have found that the complexity of intersectionality, transnationalism, and language (e.g., Bondy, 2016) and the engagement of Latina/o newcomers in civic education (e.g., Jaffee, 2016) that underscore how Latinas/os(x) utilize their epistemological understandings to counter and reconstruct the dominant historical narrative. For example, Latina/o(x) teachers locate their approaches to teaching history in

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their personal and cultural biographies (Salinas & Castro, 2010), and their historical positioning as essential to defying the traditional curriculum (Salinas & Sullivan, 2007).

One strand of research examines how Latina/o(x) teachers critique and disrupt the flawed traditional curriculum by presenting other perspectives and consequently constructing a nuanced narrative of history (Salinas et al., 2015). For instance, framing their qualitative case study analysis through LatCRT, Salinas et al (2016) described

Latinas/os/x bilingual teachers as “hav[ing] a conscious understanding and collection of stories that serve to strengthen the group and disrupt the ideology that seems fair and justifies the positioning of the dominant and outgroup’s place in the narrative” (para. 45).

These Teachers of Color recognize the permanence of racism and the need to author new stories and commit to social justice to combat dominant ideologies. Lastly, research from

Salinas et al. (2016) analyzes the failure of the official narrative to provide a story about the citizenship of Latinas/os/x. The introduction of the Tejano Monument Curriculum project sought to make evident the enduring presence, actions, and contributions of

Tejanas/os and accordingly edit the story of Texas and its peoples.

Much of the work concerning Black teachers demonstrates a long history of work rooted in racial uplift of the community and support of Black students (e.g., Foster, 1997;

Walker, 2000). For example, Walker’s (1996/2000) prominent historical analysis of a segregated Black school pre-Brown vs. Board of Education revealed that Black teachers care for their community and were:

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consistently remembered for their high expectations for student success, for their dedication, and for their demanding teaching style, these [Black] teachers appear to have worked with the assumption that their job was to be certain that children learned the material presented. (pp. 265-266)

Scholarly research involving Black teachers following the era of segregation shows that the commitment to community and high expectations continued. Informed by their raced, classed, and gendered experiences and cultural knowledge, Black teachers construct their pedagogical practice around familial notions of care (e.g., Beauboeuf-

Lafontant, 2005; Lynn, 2006), humanizing and culturally relevant teaching methods (e.g.,

Ladson-Billings, 2009; ross et al., 2016), and the need to teach for social change (e.g.,

Hicks, 2018; Lynn, 1999).

While the research on Black teachers in social studies is unfortunately scarce, this work aligns with the lineage of work done on Black teachers generally. The literature in social studies for example reveals that Black teachers work to reconstruct traditional notions of citizenship, challenge dominant social studies narratives, and pushback against racist and deficit notions of their Students of Color (e.g., Duncan, 2019; Milner, 2014;

Pang & Gibson, 2001). For example, Vickery (2017b) found that Black women social studies teachers use a Black feminist standpoint (Collins, 2000/2009) to trouble traditional notions of citizenship that ignore the complexity of their civic identity, agency, and membership of Black women. Acknowledging that the social studies often silences or excludes the histories and identities of marginalized people, work of Pang and Gibson

(2001) found that Black teachers dedicate their energies to helping their students

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“develop a historical understanding of the effects of racism” (p. 265) by incorporating absent narratives and their own lived personal histories. Though more work needs to be done on the stances and practices of Black and Latina/o(x) teachers in social studies, the findings clearly indicate that teachers of color in the social studies seek to develop pedagogies that work in anti-oppressive ways.

Hip Hop Based Education Drawing on a variety of theoretical traditions such as critical pedagogy (Freire,

2000/2010), culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995), and counter- storytelling (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001), Hip Hop Based Education (HHBE) utilizes the elements of Hip Hop culture – Djing or turntablism, MCing or rapping, breaking or B-girling/B-boying, graffiti, and knowledge – in the classroom to “improve student motivation, teach critical media literacy, foster critical consciousness, and transmit disciplinary knowledge” (Hill, 2009, p. 2). The first wave of this work “focused almost exclusively on rap music or texts” (Hill & Petchauer, 2013, p. 2) and examined the ways Hip Hop could be used to develop and bridge the gap between academic and critical literacy practices and skills (e.g., Cooks, 2004; Hallman, 2009; Hill, 2009;

Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2002; Wakefield, 2006), rethink the ways teachers should engage, negotiate, and center their students’ identities and diverse experiences (e.g.,

Dimitriadis, 2001; Hill, 2009; Love, 2015), and promote discussion, critical reflection, and action around important political and social issues with students (e.g., Stovall, 2006;

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Williams, 2007). A second wave of literature regarding HHBE, has sought to move beyond the encoding and decoding of rap lyrics to consider the ways Hip Hop’s other elemental practices – such as battling or cyphers (e.g., Emdin, 2011, 2013), spoken word

(e.g., Hall, 2016; Low, 2011), graffiti writing (e.g., Brown, 2011; Jenkins, 2009;

Petchauer, 2015), sampling and layering (e.g., Alim & Haupt, 2017; Hafner, 2013;

Petchauer 2012, 2016), and engaging with what is widely considered the fifth element of

Hip-Hop, knowledge of self and community (e.g., Hall, 2017; Love, 2014, 2015) – promote vibrant teaching and learning environments.

Yet with the exception of Stovall (2006, 2013), Childs (2014), and Kumar (2016), scholarship within the field provides little by way of HHBE, though young people, particularly young people of color, participate in Hip-Hop culture and bring their Hip

Hop sensibilities (Love, 2016) into the classroom. Stovall’s (2006) work demonstrated the ways Hip Hop operates as a counter-narrative in social studies. Through an analysis of Hip Hop lyrics, alongside a reading of Howard Zinn’s book, Stovall (2006) illuminated omissions and distortions within the dominant narrative of the social studies curriculum for his students. Additionally, Dimitriadis (2009), working with a group of urban youth at a local community center who disliked and rejected how Black History was taught (e.g., the focus on Martin Luther King), found that by introducing Black popular culture through films (e.g., Panther) featuring Hip-Hop artists, history could be made real, moving from a “noun to a verb” (p. 121), and help develop historical consciousness. The messages and work from prominent Hip-Hop artists and scholars 160

demonstrates the possibility and power of Hip Hop’s storytelling as a transformative counter-narratives within the social studies curriculum. This work, though scant, demonstrates the powerful possibilities of Hip Hop in the classroom and the ways Hip

Hop, works as a powerful pedagogical tool that works to reconstruct the classroom and dominant curriculum in schools.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) CHHP is a framework that brings together the elements of Hip Hop culture,

Critical Race Theory (CRT), and the Freirean notions of critical pedagogy (Akom, 2009).

Akom (2009) notes that this framework seeks to operationalize transformative educational practices by bridging the gap between the interpretative lens of Hip Hop culture and critical consciousness. Bridging this gap creates “pedagogic spaces where marginalized youth are enabled to gain a consciousness of how their own experiences have been shaped by larger social institutions” (Akom, 2009, p. 63), and begin to work towards social change. CHHP consists of eleven fundamental elements that guide the praxis, two of which work to inform this work. First, “it helps teachers focus on intersectional issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality within Communities of Color”

(p. 56). Second, “it challenges the traditional paradigms … and texts as a way to engage in a discourse on race that is informed by actual conditions and experiences of people of color” (p. 56).

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Thus, CHHP aims to center people who have been historically marginalized by providing a transformative education. In social studies, where the master narrative often goes unchecked (Brown & Brown, 2015), CHHP may act as a counter- hegemonic/counter-narrative and speaks to how Hip Hop may be taken up in a critical way. In Stovall’s (2006) study student participants evaluated Hip Hop lyrics in conjunction with reflective written exercises to critically evaluate the social studies curriculum found within an urban high school. Students assessed the curriculum for content reflective of their experiences only to discover that they were either excluded or misinformed about their histories. These students were then tasked to craft a new social studies curriculum and present it to the school. Stovall’s (2006) study exemplifies the power of Hip Hop as a critical pedagogical vehicle and demonstrates the transformative power of Hip Hop (Akom, 2009) for social change. CHHP is a useful lens for this study as it provides a way to analyze the pedagogy of Teachers of Color and their alignment with critical approaches/praxes and examine the ways Hip Hop functions as a disruptive and critical pedagogical practice in social studies.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) This study also draws on Critical Race Theory (CRT). Emerging from critical legal studies, CRT was developed to examine and explain the setbacks experienced by

People of Color following the headway that had seemingly been made in the 1960’s.

Subscribing to five tenets of analysis including notions that racism is normal or ordinary

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part of society, everyday racism and interest convergence lead to colorblindness making racism hard to address, race is a social construct, differential racialization and intersectionality are consequential and centering the voices of people of color is fundamental to transforming our society (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). Each tenant seeks to unearth the subtler forms of racism and rupture societal discourses that function to impede advancements for People of Color (Bell, 1992, 1995; Crenshaw, 1991; Crenshaw et al., 1995).

Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) introduced CRT into the field of education to understand how race operated in schooling systems and launched much of the literature on CRT and education. Ladson-Billings and Tate’s (1995) analysis was premised on three assertions – (1) “race continues to be a significant factor in determining inequity in the United States”, (2) “U.S. society is based on property rights”, and (3) “the intersection of race and property creates an analytic tool through which we can understand social

(and, consequently, school) inequity” (p. 48). As institutions rooted in white supremacy, schools through their social, political, and economic practices (Apple, 2004; Bonilla-

Silva, 2010) are part of the larger racial project. Utilizing CRT as a lens provides a framework for examining the ways race and power operate in schools by speaking to the subjugation of People of Color, and it enables scholars “to more specifically highlight particular structures, events, behaviors and outcomes, in different areas of education”

(DeCuir-Gunby et al., 2019, p. 6). Moreover, CRT’s presence in the field acts as an

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“intervention that aims to halt racism by highlighting its pedagogical dimensions and affirming an equally pedagogical solution rooted in anti-racism” (Leonardo, 2013, p. 12).

CRT begins with the premise that race and racism cannot be separated from society and therefore the structures that operate within schools – as “racism as endemic and deeply ingrained in American life” (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995, p. 55) – and when applied to the field of education, CRT can root out systemic inequality and inequity that affect People of Color (Dixson, A. D., & Roussseau, 2006; Ledesma & Calderón, 2015), trouble the school curriculum (e.g., Chandler, 2015; Tyson, 2003) and introduce critical pedagogies (Lynn et al., 2013; Martell & Stevens, 2017; Parker & Stovall, 2004).

CRT, education, and social studies Despite critiques from critical and multicultural scholarship that have led to some changes within the discipline and marginal progress (Brown & Brown, 2015), social studies curriculum and textbooks continue to dilute or omit the institutional nature of racism and inequity and place groups who have been historically marginalized and at the periphery (e.g., An, 2016; Brown & Brown, 2010; Clark & Camicia, 2017; Díaz &

Deroo, 2020; Epstein, 2009; Sabzailian, 2019). As a result, “CRT sees the official school curriculum as a culturally specific artifact designed to maintain a White supremacist master script” (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 18) that becomes normalized through the various texts that exist in schools.

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Normalization of a White supremacist master script exists within the social studies curriculum. This creates a discourse of invisibility (Ladson-Billings, 2009) and politics of undetectability (Leonardo, 2009) that allows Whiteness to be both visible and invisible and reduces racism to individual acts – “bad guys doing bad things” (Brown &

Brown, 2010, p. 60) – instead of something entrenched in our larger systems (King &

Chandler, 2016). This also enables pedagogies of avoidance [emphasis added], where teachers can duck issues or narratives within the curriculum that they have little knowledge of or feel uncomfortable teaching (Levstik, 2000). In other words, social studies curricula and textbooks start with the premise of America as a successful case for democracy; a country that was able to overcome the racial, gender, and class tensions of its past. It is a false narrative that excludes stories and experiences that cannot be tied up neatly into an unblemished story of America. The social studies curriculum continues to marginalize people who have no tangible access to white middle/upper class heteronormative narratives.

Scholars have called for the use of CRT as a framework in social studies to evaluate and challenge the race-neutral narratives of curriculum, citizenship, and pedagogy that silence the voices of people of color (Chandler & McKnight, 2012;

Ladson-Billings, 2009; Navarro & Howard, 2017). Studies have illuminated the need for more critical discussions and analyses of race and racism in curriculum and textbooks

(e.g., An, 2016; Brown & Brown, 2010; Nelson & Pang, 2006; Vickery, 2017a), and in the work concerning citizenship education (e.g., Bermudez, 2014; Busey & Walker, 165

2017; Vickery 2015). As a result, Chandler (2015) moves to bring together the notion of pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986) and CRT to help preservice teachers with their “working racial knowledge” – what he terms Racial-Pedagogical-Content

Knowledge (RPCK) (p. 5).

Countering through counter storytelling A working racial knowledge can be found in counter-storytelling – defined as “a method of telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told (i.e., those on the margins of society)[,] … [and] a tool for exposing, analyzing, and challenging the majoritarian stories of racial privilege” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 32).

CRT took-up counter-storytelling methodology for several purposes. First, counter- stories “can build community among those at the margins of society by putting a human and familiar face to education theory and practice” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001, p. 475) and providing People of Color way to voice/name their own reality (Delgado &

Stefancic, 1993; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). Second, counter-stories work to “expose structures as simultaneously oppressive, marginalizing, and enabling” (Brayboy & Chin,

2019, p. 52). Third, counter-stories make the invisible visible by disrupting the normative discourses of Whiteness “to reframe the tale, flip the script” (Leonardo, 2013, p. 20) in a transformative way (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001).

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These stories derive from personal experiences and narratives told from oppressed peoples and passed down in official and unofficial ways (Yosso, 2006). In the social studies we should consider that:

The very discipline we call history is about the cultural narrative that cultures, nations, and societies tell, particularly about themselves … [that] reflect a perspective or point of view and underscore what the teller, audience, society, and/or those in power believe to be important, significant, and many times valorizing and ethnocentric. (Ladson-Billings, 2013, pp. 41-42)

Unfortunately, because these stories are perceived as inaccurate or inconsequential, they go unrecognized, resulting in the distortion or erasure of the narratives of People of Color within the curriculum (Swartz, 1992; Wills, 2001).

Counternarratives, sometimes used interchangeably with counter-stories, are a tool utilized as a curriculum act that works to disrupt the dominant narrative in social studies (Salinas & Sullivan, 2007). These narratives offer a critical and alternative perspective to the “official” curriculum by highlighting the histories and experiences of people who have been historically marginalized using critical historical thinking (Salinas

& Castro, 2010; Salinas, Blevins & Sullivan, 2012) that center the voices of communities sidelined by the curriculum (Milner & Howard, 2013; Salinas et al., 2016). In this sense, counter-narrative and/or counter-stories “can lead to transformative understandings of the past and present” (Rodríguez, 2018, p. 556) because it awakens the voices of people silenced by their orientation as “losers” or victims within the curriculum, and provides a more nuanced social, political, and economic account of the storied past and present.

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Hip-Hop serves as authentic counter-storytelling through a wholesale disruption of the dominant narrative that resists the normative worldview. While not a pure form of resistance, as sexism, homophobia, and commodification get woven in culture in different ways, Hip-Hop still “functions … as a counter-story or more explicitly as a counter- curriculum” that “challenges the myths, presuppositions, and supposed wisdom of the official curriculum – as it is raced, gendered, classed, and sexualized” (Baszile, 2009, p.13).

RESEARCH METHODS This study utilized a critical qualitative case study design (Merriam, 2014;

Thomas, 2016) to explore how Black and Latina/o(x) incorporate Hip Hop culture as a disruptive pedagogical practice. Case study is an “analyses of persons, events, decisions, periods, projects, policies, institutions or other systems which are studied holistically”

(Thomas, 2016, p. 23), and I approached this case study with a critical lens meant to challenge and transform traditional social studies curriculum and pedagogy. As a Black feminist engaging in qualitative inquiry, I acknowledge that my critiques are shaped by my personal and shared experiences with my participants. In my position as a researcher,

I conduct this research in collaboration with my participants who “breathe life into the study” (Evans-Winter, 2019, p. 21). Thus, I am aware of the words used to describe my community and those being researched and am mindful of my positionality in relation to my participants.

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The unique truths and experiences, based in the historical roots of Black feminist thought, locate knowledge at the intersections of “culturally constructed socializations of race, gender, and other identities and the historical and contemporary contexts of oppression and resistance for African American women” – what Dillard (2000) terms endarkened feminist epistemology (p. 662). Working from this epistemological stance, my research is in concert with the community/participants I work with. This collaboration speaks to the purpose of my research (Dillard, 2000, p. 662): to center the work of diverse and marginalized individuals and communities – a goal of Black feminists who do qualitative research (see Evans-Winters, 2019).

Alongside my identification as a Black feminist is my identification as someone who is a part of a generation that grew up with Hip Hop, which makes me, as Morgan

(1999) writes, “the daughter of feminist privilege”. As a beneficiary of this privilege, I have been able to prioritize and celebrate the freedom of myself and other women, while

Hip Hop has given me a way to make sense of the world and turn-up. This demonstrates, as Cooper et al. (2017) explains, how:

Hip Hop reshapes the terrain of Black feminism, making it responsive to the political and cultural realities of women and girls born in the late twentieth century. And Black feminism reshapes the landscape of hip hop, pushing it to realize and elevate its political promise and possibility. (p. 171)

When thinking about my research, I recognize that I have been influenced by, and benefited from, both forms of knowing and being, and I therefore bring these two identities together as a “Hip Hop feminist” (Peoples, 2007). My shared commitments

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with the five study participants evolved and deepened over the course of our conversations. Our kinship began with our intersecting identities as People of Color who grew up with Hip Hop as a proxy for our voices and calls for justice. Over the course of this study our kinship grew through deeper understandings of our lives as Teachers of

Color in the social studies who viewed Hip Hop music and culture as a means to disrupt.

Participants and context In the fall of 2019 four of the five participants in this study were purposefully selected based on my personal knowledge of their commitment to using Hip Hop in their social studies classrooms. The two preservice teachers were enrolled in their final semester of an urban focused teacher education program at State University and two of the in-service teachers were graduates of the same urban focused teacher education program. I was introduced to a third practicing teacher, the fifth participant, through social media. Through the relationship we established online, I learned of her use of Hip

Hop in the classroom and I started working with her in the spring of 2020. Collectively

(see Appendix A, Table 1), these five social studies teachers described the importance of

Hip Hop pedagogies and culture to disrupt the traditional and marginalizing curriculum.

Megan, a Black woman, graduated from a master’s level critical urban teacher education program at State University and was hired just outside of Mid-City limits at

Philly Tech in Eastside Independent School District (EISD). The suburban district was largely comprised of Latina/o(x) students and was also a district with a notable Black

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population due the gentrification of Mid-city. Also notable was the school’s diverse teaching staff. With a high teacher turnover rate and her stellar reputation as a strong teacher, Coach Pete, as her student and colleagues called her, was appointed the role of

Social Studies Department Head at her school following her first-year teaching. She was also assigned three subject area preparations to teach including U.S. History—the state assessed course required for high school graduation. She also coached basketball and track. Coach Pete’s students were firmly immersed in Hip Hop culture. She said of one of her students, “He gets his whole personality from Hip Hop”. She saw Hip Hop as a way to communicate with her students. Coach Pete, whose robust Hip Hop understanding of the culture emerged from her experiences with her dad, utilized Hip Hop in her classroom because she saw the ways the culture lived in and with her student – “I feel like Hip-Hop is how they communicate who they are to the world.”

T. Brown worked in a large southern city hours away from Mid-City at Southside

Independent School District at Freeman Middle School. The school had been given an

“F” rating14 via the state’s accountability system and was under the significant scrutiny of a mandated improvement plan. As a fourth year alternatively certified eighth grade U.S.

History teacher, she also held an administrative-type position in the fall of 2020. Ms.

Brown realized quickly that she had not been adequately prepared to work in a linguistically and culturally diverse urban school. Most of the students at her middle

14 The school was found unsatisfactory by the state and the state has a strict and punitive system for schools that do not meet requirements.

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school were Latina/o(x) and nearly half of the students were labeled as second language learners. A dedicated teacher, she discovered that her bilingual students shared her love for Hip Hop. Ms. Brown used her marked understanding of Hip Hop’s cultural practices to engage her students, build their vocabulary, and give them the space to bring their outside of school knowledge into the classroom. With the pressure to help her students pass the U.S. History state-mandated test and a poor school rating, Ms. Brown saw Hip

Hop as a cultural practice that could help her students make sense of the school curriculum.

Antonio Ocasio, a gay Latino man, was in his first-year teaching when this study began. After graduating from a critical urban teacher education program at State

University, Antonio began teaching in Mid-City at Southeast Schools – a public charter system with open enrollment that mirrored MCISD’s linguistic and cultural diversity. His school principal’s philosophies aligned with his own. In a meeting that took place before the year began, Mr. Ocasio was informed he was going to be able to teach an elective class of his choosing. He would have carte blanche in designing the curriculum - he just had to show the class served an educative purpose. Mr. Ocasio knew what he wanted to do right away. Hip Hop for Mr. Ocasio was a creative outlet and a way to express himself, and he was a passionate participant in the culture. As a result, Mr. Ocasio decided to teach an elective in Hip Hop History class. The class, entitled ASTROWORLD, would examine Hip Hop culture and the social, political, and economic context from

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which the culture emerged. Mr. Ocasio believed that Hip Hop lives and speaks to communities of color in ways traditional school does not.

Cordae Dunston was in his final semester as an undergraduate in a critical urban education program at State University when this project began. He was student teaching at a local middle school in Mid-City Independent School District (MCISD) - a predominantly Latina/o(x) urban district. Mr. Dunston grew up listening to Hip Hop with his mother and is deeply connected to the Hip Hop sound and culture of the large

Southwest city where he grew up. Mr. Dunston’s cooperating teacher gave him license to do as he liked with the lessons as long as he addressed whatever content/topic was required for the day. Mr. Dunston eagerly decided to use Hip Hop because he felt it was more engaging and relevant to his student’s lives. He also felt like much of the history curriculum was seeped in fabrications and Hip Hop could help him correct the record.

Destiny Gutiérrez, a Latina, was in the student teaching semester in the same critical urban education program at State University as Cordae. She was placed in an

Ethnic Studies class with a cooperating teacher well aligned with the program’s stance, also in Mid-City Independent School District (MCISD). Ms. G, as her students called her, openly expressed being committed to being a critical social justice teaching, actively planned with her cooperating teacher and was given the opportunity to plan student- centered projects. As a young teacher, she described her love for art and Hip Hop as an extension of artistic expression. She also saw Hip Hop as a way to make “the past

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present”. Ms. G inserted Hip Hop as a way for students to put forward their work and connect the current socio-political environment to events of the past.

Data collection and analysis Data for this study was collected and analyzed during the spring and fall of 2020.

Data sources included three semi-structured interviews, student and participant artifacts, and classroom observations and field notes. As a Black feminist researcher whose experiences are filtered through the varied complex lenses of my identity, data exists in traditional forms like interviews but also in non-traditional forms like a piece of music sent to me to listen to after an interview (Evans-Winter, 2019). Understanding this, additional data sources included spoken word writing and reflections, informal music recommendations, style of dress, participant-generated podcast discussions, and so on.

These generative cultural practices illustrate how my participants conceive of Hip-Hop’s use as disruptive practices in the classroom and are therefore useful texts of analysis. I was also able to access archival data, which included classroom observations, videos, and lesson plans.

Interviews and both structured and unstructured classroom observations were digitally recorded and transcribed. Additionally, some of the lessons were video recorded as access to the physical classroom was prohibited during the coronavirus pandemic.

During these observations, written field notes were taken in a journal and include sketches of the classroom, student and teacher quotes, classroom activities, and my own

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reflective comments. The same process used during in-person observations was followed for video recorded classroom lessons. However, I was unable to document classroom layout or in some cases see all of the student’s faces or reactions to the lesson.

Following the data collection process, data was coded and analyzed for emerging themes drawing on my theoretical frameworks – CRT and CHHP. Using the analytic software Dedoose to organize and visualize my codes and themes, in an initial coding process I identified codes by highlighting words and phrases that spoke to my research question and conceptual framework. Looking for threads in the data – “interpretative elements that the researcher weaves through events and images in the fieldwork to provide a coherent way of thinking about the topic” (Graue, 1998, p. 163), I classified codes and merged them to build themes. For example, the notion of culturally relevant pedagogy was present in interviews, classroom observation, participant artifacts, and journals. Following initial coding, I began to think about this code in relation to the conceptual framework. What had previously been coded as culturally relevant pedagogy actually fell under the theme Hip Hop for engagement and relevance.

Furthermore, as a researcher who works from a Black feminist standpoint, my interactions with my participants were very relational. I was in frequent contact with my participants through both informal and formal means. These informal interactions acted as a form of member checking, as well as moments where I asked in an interview-style setting whether I had interpreted the participants' words and responses correctly.

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EMERGING THEMES: HIP HOP AS A DISRUPTIVE PEDAGOGY IN THE SOCIAL STUDIES Influenced by their lived experiences and understandings of Hip Hop culture, an initial examination of the data revealed that these teachers all explicitly utilize Hip Hop as culturally relevant text (Epstein et al., 2011) to engage students and help them make sense of their social studies subjects. A deeper examination of the participants’ approaches to the use of Hip Hop illuminated that while engagement and understanding was the goal for some of the participants, the other social studies teachers utilized Hip

Hop as a disruptive pedagogy to challenge the dominant narrative/traditional curriculum.

The distinction is vital in describing the use of Hip Hop as a means to make social studies content accessible to Students of Color in contrast to constructing social studies content that is transformative for students. Teachers like Ms. Brown and Coach Pete used Hip

Hop to engage students within the mandated curriculum in hopes of having their students understand, “master” and “appropriate” the official curriculum and assessments

(Wertsch, 2002). Mr. Dunston, Mr. Ocasio, and Ms. G sought to “master” and trouble/”resist” the official school curriculum as means to confront the hegemonic function of narratives that maintain systems of oppression and ignore/negate

Communities of Color, women, and LGBTQIA+ peoples (Magill & Salinas, 2019;

Wertsch, 2002). It is important to note that all five participants were committed to the many values of Hip Hop pedagogies but that underlying political and ideological clarity differed (Bartolomé, 1994; Blevins et al., 2020).

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“Sound of the funky drummer/Music hitting ‘the heart’ cause I know you got soul/Brothers and sisters” – Chuck D (2020, intro): Hip Hop for engagement, relevance, mastery and appropriation After I asked Ms. Brown how she decides what songs to bring into her lessons, she noted:

I really look it as…I care about intent and impact over fluff…So, have you ever told a joke and had to explain the joke? And then you realize the joke isn’t funny, right? That’s how I think about what I’m going to bring into the classroom. What can I bring in the that’s going to be intentional and tactful that I don’t have to explain too much about it? Because if I spend five to ten minutes explaining this song, then was it really impactful and intentional? No. So then it just turns into a history lesson on Beyoncé. Beyoncé is the vehicle, right? It’s not my destination. And if the vehicle isn’t working, then my kids aren’t going to get to the destination I need them to get to. And my ultimate goal is to get them to a destination.

Ms. Brown reveals that, for her, Hip Hop works as a pragmatic tool aimed at getting to the larger goal of helping her students make sense of the curriculum she was charged to teach. Done primarily through music and lyric analysis, Ms. Brown utilized Hip Hop to make the traditional social studies content more accessible to her class of predominately

ESL/emergent bilingual students. Using her sophisticated Hip Hop fluency/knowledge, she crafted lessons that acknowledged her ESL/emergent bilingual students' cultural and linguistic out-of-school knowledge by incorporating Hip Hop songs that she noticed her students singing in class. The objectives of these Hip Hop infused lessons were creatively designed to fit the interests of the students as a means to connect personal/community knowledge to concepts and constructs essential to learning 8th grade American history.

In a video recorded lesson I observed, Ms. Brown covered the influence of the historic Magna Carta document on the U.S. system of government. She wanted her 177

students to identify the connection between the Magna Carta and the concept of limited government. She began the class and lesson by playing a song. Cueing up audio, she played the opening instrumental beats and guitar chords to Carlos Santana’s song “Maria

Maria” featuring The Product G&B. As the song played without lyrics, she asked, “Have you heard this song before?” A cascade of voices rang out across the classroom in what felt like planned unison, “‘Wild Thoughts!’ … ‘Wild Thoughts!’ … ‘Wild Thoughts!’”

As the class settled, Ms. Brown let the kids in on the ruse she had just executed. She informed them that the song was from Santana and that DJ Khaled had heavily sampled – taking portions of a song’s sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or element in a new song recording – Santana’s “Maria Maria” for his track “Wild Thoughts” featuring

Rihanna and Bryson Tiller.

Ms. Brown then played a short clip of “Maria Maria”, with the lyrics, and “Wild

Thoughts.” Her students noticed the songs had similar beats, but the lyrics and musical arrangement were different. After garnering her students’ attention and pulling in, she transitioned to the actual focus of the lesson – where the idea of limited government expressed in documents like the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and Bill of Rights came from. She then discussed the Magna Carta, comparing it to the song

“Maria Maria.” Looking at excerpts of the document with her students, she noted that the

Magna Carta sought to limit the power of the king by stating that no one was above the law. They then looked at small excerpts of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S.

Constitution looking at places where the founders expressed or limited the power of 178

government. Ms. Brown asked, “So let’s think about what we discussed earlier, if the

Magna Carta is “Maria Maria”, where do you think the Founding Fathers got the idea of limiting the power of government?” Ms. Brown called on a student with their hand raised, who asked, “The Magna Carta?” not quite sure he was correct. Ms. Brown responded in the affirmative, “That’s right! The Founding Fathers were the original DJ

Khaled. They sampled the idea of limited government from the Magna Carta just like DJ

Khaled sampled Santana’s ‘Maria Maria’!”

Ms. Brown’s Hip Hop lesson is ingenious and demonstrates her command or fluency of Hip Hop culture and her ability to connect her students’ lived experiences and knowledge. By linking Latin-infused Hip Hop songs, one created by a Mexican-born

American that makes mentions of Spanish Harlem (“Maria Maria”) and another where the video is filmed in Miami’s Little Haiti with images of people salsa dancing (“Wild

Thoughts”), she acknowledged her students’ complex identities and tapped into their community of cultural wealth (e.g., linguistic, navigational, and social capital) (Yosso,

2006). However, this lesson also demonstrates the ways Hip Hop, for Ms. Brown, is enacted as a means to make the traditional curriculum more accessible for her Lationas/os students whose first language is not English. Accessing their understandings through their experiences and language, she helped her students translate from Hip Hop to the Magna

Carta to the U.S. Constitution.

Ms. Brown was consistent in her use of Hip Hop pedagogies as an avenue to achieve mastery. In a simpler instructional approach, she also used Hip Hop to make 179

sense of vocabulary and concepts embedded in the primary and secondary sources, and to create rap songs – in a vein similar to the biographical storytelling of Alexander Hamilton in the musical Hamilton: An American Story – where she would rap over instrumental beats of popular songs to retell different historical events. Using Nelly’s song “Dilemma” featuring Kelly Rowland, Ms. Brown outlined the meaning of language found in the textbook about the Constitutional Convention. Rapping over an instrumental of the song

“Knuck If You Buck,” she explained the Monroe Doctrine, while students were asked to rap over the instrumental of the song “Despacito” and reword the compromises at the

Constitutional Convention in their own language. No matter the required content to be learned that day, Hip Hop was a vehicle of culturally relevant engagement and means to master the disciplinary skills and dominant narratives of social studies.

In many ways, Coach Pete was similar to Ms. Brown as she sought to insert Hip

Hop in her lessons to further students' understanding of the official social studies curriculum through engaging and relevant texts. Whether it was using rap songs that reference historical figures or events in the 90’s (i.e, Bill Clinton’s affair and impeachment) or incorporating rap to discuss the role of rap music as a tool in music therapy in her Psychology class, like Ms. Brown, Coach Pete used Hip Hop to make the official school content in the social studies more relevant and accessible. Challenged by the burdens of too many course preparations, added extracurricular responsibilities and the pressures of state level tests, Coach Pete taught in a highly pressured and heavily scrutinized school environment. 180

However, there were glimpses of Coach Pete and Ms. Brown’s need to disrupt.

Ms. Brown engaged her students in a discussions around schools being named after confederate soldiers and had them write letters to the city and school boards expressing the need to change the name of the schools. Coach Pete inserted discussions around the

Chicano Movement and sexism in the American political system after discovering it was missing from the official curriculum. These moments of pedagogies of resistance were infrequent but important for me to note. On one hand, they offer a glimpse of the disruptive practices Coach Pete and Ms. Brown longed to implore. On the other hand, because they were not consistent in questioning power/oppression, their use of Hip Hop and other disruptive pedagogies remained within the realm of mastery and appropriation

(Wertsch, 2002).

“They tryna erase our history, stop and think” – YG (2020, verse 5): Hip Hop for transformation Found within a reflective journal entry sent to me by Mr. Ocasio is a declaration of the transformative nature of Hip Hop music and culture:

The idea behind ASTROWORLD is to viscerally trace the evolution of Rap music, from its origins in New York City, to the Atlanta-centric style we hear today. Rather than a class where we simply listen to Rap, which is still valid and substantial, I wanted to construct a class in which the students and I took socio- cultural frameworks from academia and applied them to Rap music in all of its forms. In other words, ASTROWORLD is a place to study hip/hop as a researcher, to dissect the music from its cultural and historical contexts in order to gain a greater understanding of how it’s evolved throughout the decades, from the 1970’s to present day. …

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The first day of ASTROWORLD was a crucial one: It gave me the opportunity to introduce the class as a place to cultivate curiosity for Rap. I found that students rarely think of Rap as a product of culture, history and resistance. Instead, it’s often viewed as nothing more than something to listen to. Reframing Rap music as a form of study alters the way students interact with it. It brings Rap music to life in novel ways, transforming the sounds in their headphones to real human stories of oppression, resilience and art.

Mr. Ocasio’s journal entry reveals that Hip Hop pedagogy is not only about engagement and mastery of social studies facts, skills, and concepts, but also about uncovering what artists as activists/dissidents are asking of the world. In this sense, Mr. Ocasio conceptualized Hip Hop as a means to bring voices on the margins of social studies to the center and challenge the dominant curriculum. Mr. Ocasio, along with Mr. Dunston and

Ms. G, incorporated Hip Hop, through lyrical, video, and imagining (Alridge, 2005) analysis, as a counter-story/narrative for socio-historical/political/economic examination and transformation. Deliberately and with clarity, Mr. Ocasio used Hip Hop pedagogy to master and resist (Bartolome, 1994; Wertsch, 2002). In the following vignette, I use a lesson that Mr. Dunston designed to analyze the use of Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy in the social studies.

It’s a regular day in Mr. Dunston’s classroom and the students in Mr. Dunston’s class are about to have everything they think they know turned upside down. Mr.

Dunston is going to introduce the required lesson on the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment –

America’s moment of salvation, progress, and reconstruction after the Civil War.

However, Mr. Dunston’s primary focus, “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” is an examination of the “failed” amendments made to the Constitution following 182

Reconstruction. Mr. Dunston’s underlying premise is, “In order to understand the present or the future, you got to go look at the past.” He set up set up a critical historical inquiry that entailed the students first translate each of the Reconstruction amendments (1865) into their own words. The student then worked in small groups with a set of document- based questions and chronologically labeled sources to explore the contrast to the rights and justices enumerated in the amendments.

A 1964 literacy test from Louisiana state was followed by a video from the

Southern Poverty Law Center (2014) where a ninety-four-year-old Dorothy Guilford reflects on her experiences with poll taxes and literacy tests and new efforts to suppress the voting of minoritized peoples. Finally, an excerpt from Michelle Alexander’s The

New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) is included for the students to read and analyze. At this point, the students have come to realize that Mr.

Dunston has introduced a commonly understood post-Civil War/Reconstruction story while also beginning to cast doubt on the rights that were truly afforded to African

Americans after 1865. The pitch of the lesson escalates as Mr. Dunston introduces a video regarding the failure of the war on drugs from the New York Times (2016) voiced by rapper Jay-Z. For the students engaged/enthralled in the lesson, the counter-narrative and rhythm is now set and extended through a video and lyrical analysis of music from

Hip Hop artist Common (“Black America Again,” 2016) and Killer Mike (“Reagan,”

2012).

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The pattern of a Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) lesson set out by Mr.

Dunston was not uncommon for him and unfamiliar to his students. The official objectives of his lesson complied with state curriculum standards and a well accepted body of knowledge that students are expected to master in order to become an informed citizenry. The state curriculum standard read “Students will be able to identify the 13th,

14th, and 15th amendments and explore the ways these amendments impact Americans and other minorities from the 1865-present.” His outward compliance however, was complicated as he added a much more complex interpretation and moved to a “believing but not knowing” learning objective that openly rejects the mandated curriculum,

“problem-poses”, and builds to the crescendo of a counter-story/narrative analysis

(Wertsch, 2002). The second objective established a paradox for Mr. Dunston’s students between the promises of the Reconstruction amendments and the realities experienced by

African Americans, other racially marginalized peoples, and women. Like Hip Hop’s unique voice of defiance, Mr. Dunston’s objectives are both an example of strategic resistance and overt calling out/naming of the curriculum’s problematic function in our society and democracy.

An additional layer of analysis considers that Mr. Dunston, through CHHP, centered his students’ experiences and knowledge by using the culturally relevant primary sources and Hip Hop. The lyrics of Common and Killer Mike emphasized an existing consciousness that was affirmed by Mr. Dunston’s elevation of Hip Hop knowledge as school knowledge (Freire, 2000/2010). As Mr. Dunston moved around the 184

classroom for example, the students worked through the sources in their four-squared table groups chatting among their tablemates. Rumblings of “I didn’t know this; This is jacked up Mr. Dunston; Mr. Dunston this is real messed up” could be heard from the students.

In using Hip Hop, Mr. Dunston extended his reach and engaged his students from past to present from 1865 to 2020. The primary sources and the lyrics of Hip Hop in the social studies classroom worked to “foreground race and racism and their intersectionality with other forms of oppression [(in this case class/economic)]” (Akom,

2009, p. 63). The deliberate use of Hip Hop culture as a “counter-curriculum [that] … challenge[d] the myths, presuppositions, and supposed wisdoms of the official curriculum” (Baszile, 2009, p. 13) and raised students’ consciousness and opportunities to connect current social and political conditions of marginalized peoples to the past.

DISCUSSION Through Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) we can examine the importance of Teachers of Color’s decisions to enact disruptive pedagogies in the social studies. Pedagogies that seek to disclose or make problematic a dominant school narrative that diminishes the experiences of Communities of Color, women, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community are essential in affirming diverse identities and building a more inclusive democracy (Rodríguez & Salinas, 2019; Vickery,

2017a). The Hip Hop practices of the Black and Latina/o(x) social studies teachers in this

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study appear similar, as students in their classrooms actively engage in the lessons and their Hip Hop knowledge is recognized and sustained (Alim & Paris, 2017). At its face value, Hip Hop pedagogy is an asset-based practice through which teachers worked to utilize the cultural practices relevant to students and Communities of Color. However, a deeper examination demands that we consider the layers of knowledge and commitments needed to fully realize Critical Hip Hop Pedagogies and as well as the challenges teachers of color may encounter.

The use of CHHP and CRT in the social studies calls to the forefront the racial, gendered, classed, and other intersecting experiences of Communities of Color. Hip Hop serves to affirm realities and lived knowledge of marginalized communities and acts as kind of civic voicing – of telling each other and others that the experiences of people of color, women, LGBTQIA+ community, and other marginalized communities are here, and they matter. This voicing is embedded in narratives, contemporary events and individuals/movements that portray the defiance, resiliency, and persistence of marginalized communities. The social studies curriculum, void of these portraits, becomes relevant to Teachers of Color and their students through CHHPs. Furthermore, the insertion of counter-stories/counter-narratives serves to dislodge dominant narratives or majoritarian tales (Delgado, 2013) and makes central the historical, geographic, and economic realities of others.

Hip Hop culture as a part of the social studies becomes transformative when

“marginalized youth become aware of how their own experiences have been shaped by 186

larger social institutions” (Akom, 2009, p. 55). Classroom teachers who seek a transformative end by providing their students a kind of alternative and anti-oppressive curriculum through Hip Hop can interrogate the dominant narratives found in social studies. CHHP bridges the content of social studies with the socio-political/geographic and economic realities of people who have been historically marginalized.

It is important to note that not all Hip Hop enactments are the same. There appears to be a threshold at which Hip Hop pedagogies become Critical Hip Hop

Pedagogies. If Hip Hop is used to solely lure students into the curriculum, then the hegemonic intent of mastery and appropriation is achieved (Wertsch, 2002). Teachers and students accept the unblemished and celebratory narratives common to the curriculum (e.g., King, 2019; King & Chandler, 2016; Milner, 2014). However, if Hip

Hop is used to lure students into an inquiry of the curriculum, then the hegemonic intent of mastery and appropriation is countered by resistance (Wertsch, 2002; Salinas et al.,

2018). A threshold of “critical” might be examined through a lens of political and ideological clarity (Bartolome,1994) or the ability of classroom teachers to take up

CHHPs as genuinely disruptive (Blevins et al., 2020).

In the social studies, political and ideological clarity is enacted by what Belvins,

Magill, and Salinas (2020) refer to as subject area consciousness, the “knowledge and ability to see and counter oppression represented in the canon of a particular disciplinary approach or narrative” (p.19). To do the work of making these links between Hip Hop and content requires not only a deep understanding of Hip Hop or fluency, but also the 187

consciousness of how the social studies serves to nation-build through exclusion. For example, greater subject area consciousness would have emphasized a connection between the U.S. Constitution and the Iroquois League (see Tooker, 1988) not singularly the Magna Carta. In contrast, the failure of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments throughout most of the post Reconstruction, including through sophisticated connections to contemporary voting laws and mass incarceration data, is an example of subject area consciousness meant to counter the social studies mandated narrative/curriculum.

Context continues to be a driving force in teacher decision making, complicating teachers’ opportunities to reach a threshold. High stakes or state level examinations serve as real or imagined mechanisms of control, and often (but do not always) stifle teacher’s pedagogical intents. In the social studies there are findings that contend ‘ambitious teaching’ can occur regardless of the accountability policies and consequences that narrow the curriculum (e.g., Grant & Salinas, 2008; Saye et al., 2014). However, a larger body of work (e.g., McNeil, 2000) as well as findings from this project establish that teachers inevitably feel a significant level of surveillance that reduces the humanizing intent and disruptive value of CHHP. Driven by a listing of skills, facts, and concepts, critical Hip Hop can be reduced to Hip Hop for the sake of mastering and appropriating the traditional content of the social studies.

In comparison, teachers afforded the freedom to play with ideas and stretch the curriculum are more likely to have the opportunity to engage in CHHPs. The opportunity to teach an elective, or to find a cooperating teacher, colleague, or principal that shares a 188

critical stance is empowering for social studies teachers wanting to offer the counter- stories inherent to Hip Hop and essential in providing counter-narratives. CHHP becomes a lens by which teachers and their students examine the curriculum and raise their own awareness. This awareness-raising is necessary for a transformative form of Hip Hop praxis and social studies instruction needed for smashin’ the power structure.

Pulling back the layers of these teachers’ practices describes the ways Hip Hop in its pedagogical aims manifest in the classroom differently depending on intentions and opportunity. Through Hip Hop, teachers engage students and introduce voices/cultural practices students are familiar with to help them make sense of the content. Thus, the findings in this paper suggest absent the fluency of how the entire geographic, historic, and economic story and socio-political context of Hip Hop intersects to their subject area,

Hip Hip becomes a type of disciplinary pedagogical tool instead of a transformational one.

IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION The Information Age Got ‘em seein’ what’s really wrong with these racist days … The next generation still singin’, “Fight the Power”

- Nas (2020, verse 1)

Hope lies in transformation and it is at the juncture of Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy and social studies where transformational change is most ripe. The power of Hip Hop culture is that it can challenge the traditional social studies narrative, thereby constructing

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a new kind of social studies curriculum and creating a dual pedagogical space that emphasizes inclusive narratives. These economic, geographic, and historic narratives reflect the identities of communities often silenced alongside the existing narratives. Put in relation to each other, both Hip Hop culture and the dominant social studies narrative can be critically examined and can prompt students to find the possibilities for change.

Black and Latina/o(x) teachers who use Hip Hop culture to teach for this critical transformation do so by bridging the gap between Hip-Hop culture and subject area consciousness.

Findings in this paper show that it is important for social studies teacher education programs to provide space for preservice teachers to find the bridges between their ideological clarity, cultural knowledge, and their subject area understandings. By also engaging in discussions on the importance of intersectionality, teacher educators can help students find the intersectional links that exist between Hip Hop and social studies subjects. Bridges include the link between Hip Hop’s emergence around the country and world and geography and economics. They also include the intersectional connections between enduring issues of racial progress and the role of Hip Hop culture in modern-day social movements. Even if teacher educators have little Hip Hop knowledge, stressing the importance of intersectional work in social studies can aid teacher candidates with Hip

Hop fluency in finding these links.

Teacher education programs should also attend to helping Black and Latina/o(x) teachers confront contextual realities of working in urban spaces that can work to 190

constrain critical praxis. Surveillance and notions of testing pressure has been a reality of working in urban spaces for a longtime (e.g., Achinstein et al., 2010), and while teacher education programs can show teachers how to teach critically when confronted with the realities of trying to stay employed and trying to do critical work, the pressure can impede the work. Until conditions change, it is important that teacher education programs provide opportunities for preservice teachers to engage in critical lesson planning and analysis, and practice taking strategic risks in a classroom. It is also important that teacher education programs engage preservice teachers in reflexive praxis. Many times critical Hip Hop educators aim to teach for transformation but need assistance processing how to get there consistently. Finally, we should also begin pushing urban districts and schools to recognize the expert knowledge of teachers who are engaging in sophisticated and critical praxes. Because hope lies in transformation and critical Hip Hop practices so we must help Black and Latina/o(x) social studies teachers keep exclaiming “Fight the

Power.”

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Chapter 6: Recognize the “we”: Examining Hip Hop, civic-ness, and the politics of belonging

“That’s How We Talk”15

I love when my family comes over because the house is so loud and funny. That’s how we talk.

We sit at the table. Slamming cards or dominoes, talking mess, laughing and sharing stories. That’s how we talk.

When the adults start to talk “‘grown folks’ business”, us kids have to run off. Cause as my grandma would say, “A child should know place and it’s not in grown folks’ business.” That’s how we talk.

It’s never quiet when we watch a movie. Everyone is talking to the people, making predictions, analyzing the situation, laughing and walking around. That’s how we talk.

At the dinner table the conversation is so rich. Everyone always has something to say, we don’t have to wait to speak, we just talk. That’s how we talk.

When I am doing my homework, my mom will ask how or why this is my answer. My mom never lets me off the hook without explaining my thought process. That’s how we talk.

Sitting on the couch watching TV my Uncle will sit next to me asking, “What am I watching? How am I doing? How is school?” And give me the best advice after listening to what I had to say. That’s how we talk.

Whenever I complain my dad would say “Back in my day...” Oh gosh it’s downhill from there and we have to listen to some story that makes me think and/or laugh. That’s how we talk.

15 (see Appendix B, Whole Copy of “That’s How We Talk” – T. Brown, 2020) 192

- T. Brown (2020, Part I)

Initially in my conversations with T. Brown, her decision to use Hip Hop in her classroom appeared primarily for grabbing her students’ interests, improving their knowledge of social studies facts and skills, and helping them pass state-level standardized exams needed to be promoted to the next grade. However, with each passing formal and informal conversation, I affirmed her use of Hip Hop in a schooling environment that had worked to stifle her instructional practice and her students’ interest in their own learning. After one of our longer conversations where she discussed her experiences as a teacher, T. Brown sent me “That’s How We Talk” a spoken-word piece/poem. I recognized this as her testimonial claim of defiance, and evidence that she had begun to think about Hip Hop in the classroom beyond just a tool for standardized academic success (Grant & Salinas, 2008; Salinas, 2006). Brown’s poem was a way of saying that her pedagogical practice was valued, even though administrators and colleagues criticized her use of Hip Hop in her social studies classroom. “That’s How We

Talk” served as her way of saying that Hip Hop is at the essence of our identities and experiences, how we speak and voice ourselves, and how we connect to the world.

Her classroom was an authentic space where her students' voices would be respected. It was also an ode to her civic-ness – a shared identity, agency, and membership between her students and the Communities of Color she served.

Critical ideals of citizenship for People of Color, women, and members of the

LGBTQIA+ community question “the centrality of the nation-state and homogenous 193

identity” (Abowitz & Harnish, 2006, p. 668) found in the traditional curriculum. The umbrella of critical discourses emphasizes multicultural (e.g., Dilworth, 2004), cultural

(Ladson-Billings, 2004; Rosaldo, 1997), queer (Bracho & Hayes, 2020; Camicia, 2017), feminist (Vickery, 2015, 2016), and transnational (Bondy, 2017; El-Haj, 2009) citizenship. Ultimately, critical discourses engage in the long-standing tensions surrounding the politics of recognition (Harris-Perry, 2011) and the politics of belonging

(Yuval-Davis, 2006). The politics of belonging contends that shifting identities and political locations determine who belongs and who does not (Yuval-Davis, 2006).

Sustaining “imagined communities” of belonging entails contestations and struggles for determination and ultimately “narratives of identity” that should also include stories of agency and membership (Yuval- Davis, 2006, p. 205). Communities of Color and other marginalized people conceive of their citizenship through this sense of belonging and the narratives that accompany their civic-ness (Vickery, 2017b).

The traditional citizenship and social studies curriculum contributes to the misrecognition and alienation of marginalized groups in a number of ways (Salinas,

2006). First, the tacit erasure, silencing, and twisting of historic, economic, and geographic narratives creates a singular and uncomplicated understanding of the past and present, personal, and community (e.g, Wills, 2001; King, 2019). Second, dominant discourses of citizenship, categorized as civic republicanism and liberalism, pervade the curriculum (Abowitz and Harnish, 2006) normalizing white civic knowledge (Sabzalian,

2019) and forms of and access to civic engagement (e.g., Adjapong, 2020; Knight & 194

Watson, 2013; Woodson & Love, 2019). Finally, the “crooked room” (see Harris-Perry,

2011) of social studies acts as a sort of curriculum violence (Ighodaro & Wiggan, 2010) because, as Jones (2020) argues, omitting our narratives and histories from the curriculum “or teaching [them] in ways that are irresponsible is violent[,] … [and] it harms how … students learn history and see themselves in it” (para. 10). As result, it is imperative that we take up critical civic discourses.

Notably, however, the work of Sabzalian (2019) emphasizes that even when engaging in critical notions of citizenship, the colonial erasure of Indigenous peoples continues. This project acknowledges the presence of the colonial power that exists within the civic realities of marginalized communities (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Constructed and remade in communities that have experienced oppression within the United States settler project (Quijano, 2007), Hip Hop’s resistant roots work to reject colonial notions of citizenship.

Unequivocally, Hip Hop culture challenges the problematic nature of the social studies. Its very origins derive from making the invisible visible and empowering communities. Hip Hop culture emerged from Black and Latina/o(x) communities during the convergence of urban neglect, poverty, community, and innovation (Ewoodzie, 2017) to become a global phenomenon and cultural practice (Hill, 2009). Through performative counter-stories, Communities of Color and other marginalized groups voice their stories

(Baszile, 2009) and define their civic-ness. In other words, the Hip Hop community asserts that our histories and civic narratives exist, belong in the public sphere, and 195

should be recognized. I say “our” because as a Black woman who participates in Hip Hop culture, I have found sense of self, voice, and community in Hip Hop. Yet little is known about the role of Hip Hop culture and participation in citizenship and in the social studies.

The aim of this project was to examine how Black and Latina/o(x) social studies teachers disrupt the crooked narratives of civic-ness that exist within social studies.

Specifically, I examine how Hip Hop music and culture when enacted as a pedagogical tool works to counter erroneous notions of citizenship and the traditional social studies curriculum.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK The conceptual framework guiding this study draws from the politics of recognition (Harris-Perry, 2011) and belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006), and Critical Hip

Hop Pedagogy (Akom, 2009). Working with the theories as overlapping and intersecting concepts, this framework helped me make sense of the ways Hip Hop music and culture worked to disrupt civic and social studies education.

The Politics of Recognition and Belonging The notion of the politics of recognition is often contested for failing to challenge notions of Whiteness within the political power structure and citizenship narratives (e.g.,

Coulthard, 2014). For people from marginalized communities, the existing public narrative involves a deliberate misrecognition of their civic-ness and the lack of

“opportunity to experience the public recognition for which the human-self strives”

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(Harris-Perry, 2011, p. 38). As a result, the civic-ness of People of Color is rooted in reconstructing “crooked rooms” (Harris-Perry, 2011, p. 43) - stereotypical and distorted narratives - that reject and malign our voices and stories. Yet feminist theorists like

Fraser (1997) note that the politics of recognition veils imperative conversations about the economic redistribution of resources needed for a more equitable political structure.

While these critiques are important, the politics of recognition understood through a

Black feminist lens complicates critiques by working from a lens that acknowledges the emotional toll public misrecognition plays on Black women’s bodies (Harris-Perry,

2011). The politics of recognition from Harris-Perry’s (2011) Black feminist stance states that “citizens want and need more than a fair distribution of resources: they also desire meaningful recognition of their humanity and uniqueness, and they are willing to make sacrifices to get it” (p. 36). As the result of my intersectional identity as a Black woman, I have also experienced the dizzying feeling of being in a crooked room.

According to Yuval-Davis (2006), the politics of belonging:

involves not only the maintenance and reproduction of the boundaries of the community of belonging by the hegemonic political powers but also their contestation and challenge by other political agents...it encompasses contestations both in relation to the participatory dimension of citizenship as well as in relation to issues of the status and entitlements such membership entails. (p. 205)

In other words, the politics of belonging looks at the ways people navigate and contest the boundaries/borders of the imagined community. Key to this work is the relationships people have with each other.

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Identities and our relationships to those identities are dynamic, so our locations of belonging shift depending on our experiences and the ways we define ourselves in the moment. Feminists approach this framework by “suggest[ing] ways in which these differences can be recognized [emphasis added] and responded to, [are] similar to the ways the welfare state has responded to the differential social needs of its citizens”

(Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 207). Thus, the politics of belonging subsumes/assumes recognition, and I will at times blend them through belonging and other times I will talk about them independent of each other. These overlapping concepts are vital to the work in this paper as I work to understand how citizenship lives in and/or is constructed in the social studies and Hip Hop culture.

Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy (CHHP) The second component of this framework concerns the praxis of Critical Hip-Hop

Pedagogy (CHHP) outlined by Akom (2009). CHHP aims to provide a transformative education where young people interrogate the nature of systemic oppression through Hip

Hop and other critical pedagogical notions (Akom, 2009). CHHP consists of eleven fundamental elements that guide praxis.

The elements work together to create a classroom space of “resilienc[e] and resistance … [to] dominant mindset[s], [that] increas[es] academic engagement and achievement … and build[s] new understandings” (p. 57) of Communities of Color and other marginalized groups. For the purposes of this work, CHHP’s attention and

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commitment to community and challenging the dominant discourse related to People of

Color were particularly useful when exploring the ways Hip Hop disrupts marginalizing notions of citizenship and the social studies curriculum.

CHHP challenges dominant narratives of People of Color and helps Teachers of

Color identify and make sense of the societal and systemic problems within schools. In social studies, where the master narrative often goes unchecked (e.g., Alridge, 2006;

Brown & Brown, 2015; Swartz, 1992), CHHP acts as a counter-hegemonic force and speaks to how Hip Hop, when inserted in the classroom, works to push back against meta and problematic narratives in social studies. Furthermore, CHHP is committed to understanding and working in the community. The focus on People of Color and other marginalized groups alongside commitments to community is important to understanding the work of Black and Latina/o(x) social studies teachers. Thus, CHHP is a useful lens for this study as it provides a way to analyze the pedagogies and explicit practices of

Teachers of Color that challenge culturally irrelevant and assimilationist social studies instruction.

METHOD This study utilized a critical qualitative case study design (Cannella et al., 2015) to explore the ways Teachers of Color illuminate power and uproot/challenge narratives within the social studies curriculum through the disruptive pedagogical practice of

CHHP. Thomas (2016) defines case study as an “analyses of persons, events, decisions,

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periods, projects, policies, institutions or other systems which are studied holistically”

(Thomas, 2016, p. 23). The goal of critical research is “to critique and challenge, to transform and empower” (Thomas, 2016, p. 34). As a critical researcher who engages in

Black feminist qualitative inquiry, it also is important to acknowledge that my critiques are shaped by my personal and shared experiences, and that in my position as a researcher, the work I do in collaboration with my participants should “breathe life into the study of society and culture” (Evans-Winter, 2019, p. 21). Furthermore, it is important to be mindful of my positionality in relation to my participants, and cognizant of the words used to describe the community and those being researched.

The context of this study took place at five different campuses in, and around, large urban school spaces in the state of Texas (city and district names are pseudonyms).

While the teachers worked on different campuses with distinct teacher and student demographics, all but one school had a student population predominantly composed of

Students of Color, particularly Latina/o(x) students.

Two of the five campuses were in the same district, Mid-City Independent School

District (MCISD) (pseudonym), in a large urban city, Mid-City (pseudonym). MCISD is the main district in the city with a student population comprised of primarily Latina/o(x) students, and the preservice teachers were located at a middle school and high school within the district. One of the participants was also located in Mid-City, but at a campus classified as a public charter system with open enrollment – Southeast Schools

(pseudonym). According to the state reporting agency, Southeast Schools is composed of 200

a predominantly Latina/o(x) students and a teacher population that is predominantly white. The fourth campus in this study is located in a suburb right outside of Mid-City,

Eastside (pseudonym). The district, Eastside Independent School District (EISD), is smaller in comparison to MCISD, but the demographics are similar. EISD is a district where most of the students are Brown and the teacher population is predominantly white.

Finally, the fifth campus is located in a large urban city, South Side (pseudonym), in the district of South Side Independent School District (pseudonym). The district is primarily comprised of Students of Color, where Latina/o(x) students make up the majority of the student population (see Appendix A, Table 1).

Participants The teachers in this study were purposefully selected (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) based on their identification as Teachers of Color who participate in Hip Hop culture. Of the five participants, three are in-service teachers with 1-4 years of experience and two are preservice teachers in their final semester of their Professional Development

Sequence (PDS). Four of the participants were students in college-level social studies methods courses where I served as the instructor. During their respective times in my class, following class sessions around disrupting pedagogies and Hip Hop’s educational practices, the participants expressed interest in further discussions and strategies for use in their classrooms. I then followed these teachers along their trajectory into the field and student teaching. Beginning in the fall of 2019, I asked these four teachers if they would

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be willing to participate in this study. I was introduced to my fifth participant through social media. From the relationship we established online, I learned of her use of Hip

Hop in the classroom and I began working with her in the spring of 2020. In the section below, I discuss the participants in detail and I include their “generation” as it was important for me to situate where they entered into the timeline of Hip Hop, particularly when thinking about the types of Hip Hop they engage.

Megan Pete (pseudonym) is a Millennial who identifies as a Black woman and was in her second year of teaching when the study began. A self-described “military brat” who moved around the country often, Megan went to high school in the Southwest region of the country and moved to the East coast to attend a four-year university. Upon completion of her undergraduate studies, Megan returned to the Southwest to be closer to her family and work on her graduate degree. Megan received her master’s degree and teaching certificate simultaneously, and took a job teaching U.S. History, sociology, and psychology, and coaching basketball and track at Philly Tech High School (pseudonym), a magnet high school in EISD. A teacher who believes in adding complexity to the dominant historical narrative by centering knowledge and experiences not often found within the curriculum, Megan’s love of Hip Hop emerged from the fun of listening to music with her friends when she was younger and its ability to get her in the zone for a game.

T. Brown (pseudonym) is also a Millennial who identifies as a Black woman and was in her fourth year of teaching before being promoted to an administrative position in 202

the fall of 2020. T. Brown was born and raised by her mother in California. Her mother was a religious woman, so T. Brown’s introduction to Hip Hop was through R&B music and Kirk Franklin. Her mother also “worked really hard to ensure that [she] went to the best schools,” but those schools were predominantly white, so after high school, T.

Brown attended an HBCU (Historically Black College and University) before transferring to another college in the south where she received a degree in counseling. T.

Brown was certified through an alternative certification program where she believed she did not receive adequate training on how to work with her bilingual students. After discovering that her students engaged in Hip Hop culture, T. Brown used Hip Hop to engage her students and further their second language acquisition.

Antonio Ocasio (pseudonym) is a part of Generation Z, identifies as a gay Latino, and was in his first-year teaching. Born in Texas and raised in a northeastern suburb outside of Mid-City, Antonio grew up in a conservative community. Hip Hop gave him an outlet and a way to express himself, as he is a passionate spoken word artist. Antonio holds a bachelor’s degree from the State University and is certified in secondary

English/Language Arts and Reading. After graduating from an urban education program that centers social justice, Antonio works at Southeast Sci-Tech Middle School, a 6-8 campus a part of Southside Schools. He taught an elective in Hip Hop History, which examines Hip Hop culture and the social, political, and economic context from which the culture emerged, entitled ASTROWORLD. Antonio stated that he steeps his pedagogy in critical and justice-oriented approaches. 203

Cordae Dunston (pseudonym) identifies as a Black man and was a student teacher in his final semester as an undergraduate in an urban education program at State

University. Cordae, a member of Generation Z, was born in Texas and much of the Hip

Hop that has influenced him is a product of the large city where he grew up. At the time of this study, Cordae was an intern in a MCISD middle school and wanted to make the lessons in his Texas History placement more engaging and critical. Part of the way he worked to refashion this curriculum was to plan lessons that utilized Hip Hop.

Destiny Gutiérrez (pseudonym) identifies as a Latina, Texan, and Millenial. As a student teacher in her final semester as an undergraduate in an urban education program at State University, Destiny teaches Ethnic Studies and was able to engage students in projects that center community problem solving and activist work. Destiny loves art and sees Hip Hop as an extension of artistic expression. She is particularly drawn to lyricism of rap music and therefore has a deep appreciation for conscious rap. As a history major who has worked on large archival projects, Destiny is also committed to being a critical social justice teacher.

Data Collection During the spring and fall of 2020, data sources including semi-structured interviews, student and participant artifacts, and classroom observations and field notes were collected. Additionally, data sources were also comprised of spoken word writing and reflections, informal music recommendations, dress code, and participant generated

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podcast discussions. These cultural practices are valuable texts to be analyzed as they speak to the ways my participants construct Hip Hop and disruptive practices in the classroom.

There were three semi-structured interviews, which allowed me to be more flexible, but still include predetermined questions (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The goal of the first interview was to get a better understanding of my participants’ backgrounds. The second set of interviews served as debriefings of classroom observations and lesson plans, and opportunities to clarify answers to questions from the previous interviews. The final semi-structured interview acted primarily to member-check things said in previous interviews.

The three classroom observations were audio recorded. In addition to audio, some of the lessons were video recorded as access to the physical classroom was prohibited during the coronavirus pandemic. During classroom observations whether in-person or video-recorded, written field notes were taken in a journal and include sketches of the classroom, student and teacher quotes, classroom activities, and my own reflective comments. In the case of video recorded lessons, there were times that the whole classroom was not in view. In these instances, field notes centered on teacher movement, words, and actions.

Merriam and Tisdell (2016) define artifacts as “objects in the environment that represent some form of communication that is meaningful to the participants and/or setting” (p. 162). Some of the artifacts I collected included teacher notes and pictures, 205

PowerPoints used during lessons, teacher and student reflections, and my own reflective observation data. Additionally, lesson plans were examined alongside the classroom observation and classroom resources.

Data Analysis Data was coded and analyzed for emerging themes using the analytic software

Dedoose. During initial descriptive and Dedoose coding (Saldaña, 2016), I drew on the theories of politics of belonging and CHHP to identify words and phrases that spoke to my research question and conceptual framework. I then looked for threads in the data –

“interpretative elements that the researcher weaves through events and images in the fieldwork to provide a coherent way of thinking about the topic” (Graue, 1998, p. 163) – cycling codes to classify, prioritize, integrate, and synthesize data and build theory

(Saldaña, 2016). For example, Hip Hop’s connection to the recognition of my participants complex intersectional identities showed up in interviews, classroom observations, and participant artifacts. As I began to think about my codes, I thought about Hip Hop’s role in identity related to the politics of belonging and recognition, and as the codes developed it became a theme – Hip Hop as a critical notion of civic identity.

I then used Dedoose to organize and visualize codes and themes.

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Positionality As a Black woman, I possess a unique angle of vision (Collins, 2009) and knowledge that I try to address through the ways I research as a Black feminist qualitative researcher. This type of research:

begins with reflections on [my] own lived experiences and brings those insights into the research process. [I do] not claim to be an expert on a particular research topic or subject; however, [I do] view [my] own observations of this social world just as significant to the research process as that of other researchers and other participants in the research process[,] … [and I] challenge[] the perception that research is or needs to be conclusively objective [while] alternatively presuppos[ing] that all scientific claims are subjective. (Evans-Winters, 2019, p. 20)

Thus, as a Black woman who taught social studies in an urban high school for eleven years, I have been both an accomplice and an adversary to an oppressive curriculum and schooling structure. I have experienced what it is like to not know my histories or see myself in the curricula, thus my ontological stance recognizes that much of what we believe about the world exists in shades of gray – the complexity of subjectivity

(Wertsch, 2000).

These unique truths and experiences, based in the historical roots of Black feminist thought, locate knowledge at the intersections of “culturally constructed socializations of race, gender, and other identities and the historical and contemporary contexts of oppression and resistance for African-American women” – what Dillard

(2000) terms endarkened feminist epistemology (p. 662). Working from this epistemological stance, I understand that “all research is social construction and a cultural endeavor”, and that the work I do, in concert with the community/participants I am 207

working with, speaks to the what I believe is the purpose of my research (Dillard, 2000, p. 662), which is to center the work of diverse and marginalized individuals and communities – a goal of Black feminists who do qualitative research (see Evans-Winters,

2019).

In the discussions below, I utilize my Black feminist lens and reflect on my own civic-ness in relation to my participants use of Hip Hop. As a Black woman who identifies with Hip Hop music and culture, I am not only attempting to make room for the voices of my participants but also engaging in my own reflective process. As I examined the ways my participants brought their civic selves to the classroom, I examined the ways my civic-ness also emerges into the world. In making sense of how the study participants located their civic identity, agency, and membership, I explored my own civic positioning. Finally, working from a Black feminist standpoint means incorporating a dialogical voice through mediums like personal narratives, shared conversations, or symbols and metaphors to build and legitimize “knowledge claims that serve to portray” shared experiences (Evans-Winters, 2019, p. 20). Thus, while the data is true to the participants’ voices and actions, the narration of my civic-ness speaks to the relational nature that exists between me and the participants and the knowledge garnered through the analysis process.

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EMERGING THEMES At the heart of Hip Hop culture and social studies teachers’ decisions to enact disruptive pedagogies is an inherent link to citizenship. Not citizenship as defined through a traditional lens that promotes the obedient good citizen (Abowitz & Harnish,

2006; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004), but instead a critical citizen who is aware, conscious, and willing to engage in the issues most relevant to those marginalized by traditional citizenship lenses (e.g., Johnson, 2019; Rodríguez, 2018; Sabzalian, 2019; Vickery 2015,

2017b). In observing the five social studies teachers who took up Hip Hop culture, I contend the emergence of a kind of critical civic-ness that is both substantive and in- process. In other words, I believe that the participants’ choices in Hip Hop performance/music reflect narratives of civic-ness deeply connected to People of Color and their civic identity, agency, and membership.

First, the civic identity portrayed through Hip Hop is resilient, irrepressible, and proud of the intersecting identities that describe People of Color. Thus, the participants' use of Hip Hop culture describes, illustrates, and invokes the identity of a citizenry that has historically encountered racism, sexism, classism, and other manifestations of power that are violent and oppressive. Second, the participants used Hip Hop to nurture the civic agency of their students. Hip Hop culture implores protest, resistance, deliberations, petition, lobbying, rallying, canvassing, town halls, and other means of voice. Espousing the actions common to a citizenry that understands the importance of the Underground

Railroad, el movimiento, lunch counter sit-ins, “Sí, se puede”, and “when they go low, we

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go high,” Hip Hop therefore commands recognition and empowerment in the public sphere to affirm the color of my skin, my sexuality, and the voice that speaks in a rhythm that fills the souls of People of Color. Third, Hip Hop culture provides a sense of belonging, place, and civic membership that is otherwise displaced by our democracy.

There is an agentic force that cannot be ignored when one hears artists like Rapsody,

Public Enemy, and Kendrick Lamar as their work calls on us to move. As I listened to the participants speak, I heard a similar intent of their use of Hip Hop as a disruptive pedagogy, an in-process call to recast citizenship in the image of People of Color.

I am citizen: Hip Hop as a civic narrative of identity At some point there is an awakening and you figure out who you are. When I was younger I remember trying to fit myself into neat little boxes depending on who I was with. Box one “athlete,” box two “good student, box three “skinny,” box four the “responsible big sister who never made a mistake.” My efforts were futile because I never could fit neatly into any of these boxes. Then I saw/heard Missy Elliot and Lauryn Hill. Missy’s sound was different from everyone else’s, her look was a mix of “tomboy” cool and sexy, and she exuded an ease, a confidence. Lauryn was unapologetic, heady, and when she spoke you knew she was not just “speaking,” she was teaching. Their presence commanded attention and respect even in the midst of male-dominated arenas. I looked at them and realized that I could be like them. I could be messy, I could check off all the boxes at the same time or I could check none of them. I did not need to fit into neatly constructed boxes. What I realize now is that I constructed my boxes based on the white imagination of what I was supposed to be, and these women, in their Hip Hop womanhood, had given me permission to be myself. (Author – D. Hall)

The civic identities recognized and revered within the dominant social studies narrative portray by male, middle/upper-class Whiteness (Ladson-Billings, 2004; King &

Chandler, 2016). Thus, the civic understandings and narratives of people like me, who

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locate our identity outside of the confines of Whiteness, are therefore glossed over or ignored. Hip Hop, through its various cultural practices, however, resists “normative identity by either exaggerating the everyday or bluntly and clearly challenging various articulations of the ‘normal’” (Walcott, 1999, p. 101). Thus, through the use of Hip Hop culture, the Black and Latina/o(x) participants in this study made visible/present the civic identities and personhoods hidden within the social studies in order to challenge normalized and problematic notions of citizenship. The notion of civic identity - “the stories people tell themselves and others about who they are (and who they are not)”

(Yuval-Davis, 2006, p. 202) - emerged in three ways to disrupt the social studies curriculum.

First, the participants' civic identities emerged from their own personal narratives/biographies and experiences with social studies curriculum that excludes who they are. They were therefore committed to constructing a more inclusive social studies narrative. Thus, the participants utilized Hip Hop to position and center their own civic identities which were erased from the curriculum. For instance, in response a question about the role identity plays in his decisions, choices, and work as a teacher, Cordae noted that his intersectional identities as a Black man and Hip Hop participant (Collins &

Bilge, 2016) were critical to the ways he entered in the classroom and understood his work as a social studies teacher.

My identity as a Black man and someone who participates in Hip Hop plays a big role in what and how I decide to teach. I grew up in a heavily… Black and Brown area, with also a good percent of Asians… [and] we're still teaching these kids 211

just the same old dominant narrative B.S. … And so I'm like, "What is going on?" And even the mindsets that we have towards children... Not saying it's bad. But I don't mean to be going off on a tangent, but as far as grading and the assignments that we give out, it's kind of having that dominant teaching, like that old, white teacher, "Mrs. May from Mars" type of mentality. … The way I grew up, and my experience as a Black man, and as a huge Hip Hop and R&B fan, shapes the way I teach. … We survived and brought this culture, but it's like we're excluded in our lessons.

Cordae had a racial consciousness that came from his experiences growing up in a

‘heavily’ linguistically and culturally diverse community. He also had a critical content consciousness (Magill & Salinas, 2019) that unambiguously troubled the long-accepted curriculum and models of teaching. Cordae located his resistant practices/stances within

Hip Hop culture and utilized its cultural practices, primarily through lyrical analysis, in his lessons to challenge the “same old'' dominant narratives. Hip Hop enabled Cordae’s ability to make central Black and Latina/o(x) identities and push back against narratives that celebrated Spanish colonizers and uncomplicated notions of the founding fathers. In this work, he made space within the classroom for the civic identities not only silenced or lost to history, but also his own.

Second, the teachers in this study utilized Hip Hop to affirm their students’ civic identities and recognize who they are as people and how they live in the world matters.

Essential to the disruptive pedagogical practices of social studies and a more inclusive civic narrative are the stories of self-determination and cultural preservation like those inherent to Black cultural and historical traditions (Ladson-Billings, 2007), of which Hip

Hop culture is a part. During the semester Megan taught economics, she allowed her 212

students to present their projects for a unit on personal finance and socio-economic inequality by creating their own rap songs. Students rapped over instrumental beats about savings, investments, and the wealth gap. When asked why she gave this as a presenting option, Megan noted,

I have this kid, this boy who comes to class in these gold high-top sneakers with a chain everyday. He'll wear headphones around his head with the hat, and the other day he came past me in a fedora and an arm full of bracelets. I said, “Where you going?”, laughing because he was dressed all fancy. … I've got kids getting tattoos, I’ve got rappers. I have [students] who get their whole personality from Hip Hop. … I feel like music, Hip-Hop music, is a way of communicating and it’s how young people communicate. I wanted to incorporate it into the classroom because I felt like so many songs have these meanings behind it and meanings in it and it is the students’ way of communicating with me.

Megan’s student’s style was doing what Walcott (1999) describes as “showing out”, a performative expression of identity. By allowing her students to present their projects through the performative element of rap, Megan was able to do what the official curriculum of the social studies is unable to do – recognize others who have been excluded from the dominant citizenship discourse and “story of America.” Through Hip

Hop music, Megan was able to make relevant the identities, voices and ‘personalities’ of her students.

Finally, by utilizing Hip Hop in their classrooms, these teachers created space for students to explore, define and express their own civic identities. Traditional civic education and discourse makes little room for self-inquiry. Yet,

Identities (and the meanings assigned to them) are actively constructed through specific social practices and not merely discovered or passively assumed. These local identities constitute compromises or articulations between resistance and 213

accommodation to larger social formations and their concomitant practices and ideologies. (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 1999, p. 121)

For instance, in Antonio’s class, students were able to construct their civic identities during Free-style Friday. Antonio explained that during these rap sessions students could select their own rap names.

This is very much what it is like with people who create alter egos or something. They can be that other person up there. It's present because it doesn't just come out of fucking nowhere. But it's amplified and it's bigger and it's more dramatic. So I think that giving kids that ability allows them to explore parts of themselves and test out things. That's so important…[they] need the ability to explore that identity in a safe place. Meaning that you can explore it and people aren't going to punish you for exploring it.

Hip Hop provides the opportunity to author oneself and the teachers in this study created space for students to construct their civic identities and push back against the social studies fixed notions of civic identity. Like Megan, Antonio acknowledges the complex civic identities of his students without being concerned with the dominant lens.

He also used his fluent Hip Hop knowledge to make room for students to express and try on their dynamic civic identities and nurture a greater sense of who they are.

My call to action: Hip Hop as a civic narrative of agency While not always unproblematic, particularly in its treatment of women and the LGBTQIA+ community, Hip Hop at its core is a platform that challenges the myths of America connected to a lineage of socio-political resistance. Resistance to the marginalization of Black and Latina/o(x) folx in urban spaces, resistance to the silencing of young people, resistance to a politics of respectability. Growing up during 90’s era Hip Hop, I never felt totally connected to the political consciousness of Hip Hop. Then the killing of unarmed Black men and women erupted into the Black Lives Matter movement and Kendrick Lamar created “Alright.” This track expressed everything I was feeling. I played it in my

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classroom with my students, reveled in his performance at the 2016 Grammys, and following the election of Donald Trump I blasted it in the car on the way to protest the election of a man who had threatened the existence of marginalized communities during his campaign. “Alright” became my anthem, my call to action. (Author – D. Hall)

Civic agency is about how we enact citizenship (Abowitz & Harnish, 2004). From a critical perspective this agency is about movement and marginalized communities

“claiming membership in this society as they struggle to build communities, claim social rights, and become recognized as active agents” (Flores & Benmayor, 1997, p. 2). Thus, civic agency is the fertile ground from which social action sprouts. Hip Hop became a space where civic agency was cultivated and where young people could express their civic selves in ways that “sparked a compelling brand of political activism that joins aesthetic expression and social awareness” (Dyson, 2007, p. 68). Thus, through Hip Hop, civic selves are driven to political activism – a calling out and naming of racism (and other forms of marginalization), insisting on acts of justice. Just as I crafted a stronger sense of civic agency through Hip Hop, the social studies teacher participants fostered/cultivated civic agency of their students through Hip Hop.

Informed by their Hip Hop sensibilities (Love, 2016), the Black and Latina/o(x) teachers in this study expressed the importance of acknowledging the persistent social inequality that exists for People of Color and other marginalized groups. It was therefore important for them to help students find ways to push for social change. Antonio exemplified this sentiment stating,

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If you can teach a kid to recognize that in the very thing they listen to on a daily basis, rap music, contains history, contains effects, and products of economic and racist and whatever policy. You can teach them a lot about the world because all they have to do is look at their own world[,] … look at their own neighborhoods and create change.

Adjapong (2020) notes that “knowledge of self is central to hip-hop as it encourages participants to be aware of who they are, authentic to themselves, and confident enough to utilize hip-hop culture as a tool to create positive social-political change for their communities” (p. 94). For example, in Antonio’s class, students explored the historical context and origins of Hip Hop discovering the enduring socio-political and economic issues that are expounded in today’s Hip Hop music and culture. Through a sociohistorical analysis, Antonio’s students made connections between those social, political, and economic issues that assembled communities from the past to similar issues that now assemble their own communities to action today. Across the nation, across generations, Hip Hop was a call to action-a means to assert the civic agency of African

American and Latina/o(x) communities.

Though Destiny did not articulate the role of her civic agency in the use of Hip

Hop, Destiny brought in the work of a youth alliance group, which utilized Hip Hop inspired graphic design and graffiti (the group’s Creative Strategist is an MC), to discuss the ways Indigenous young people and groups fought and continue to fight colonization in the United States. Her display of graffiti writing stating “Water Not Oil” and images of

Indigenous activists with raised fists in front of wall murals disrupted traditional civic

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and social studies curriculum that erases the resistance of Indigenous Peoples. Destiny emphasized the importance of civic agency, stating:

For my Mexican and Black kids...it’s so important for People of Color to see themselves in history, standing up for themselves against colonizers is a huge deal. Y’all need to know that People of Color have been strong and always resisted and this isn’t new. You know, I wanted them to know that there’s a history of fighting back.

Destiny’s use of Hip Hop espoused a civic creed for teachers and students of color that called for a civic identity to (see themselves in history’) and civic agency – “standing up for themselves.” Her creed captured a historical narrative insisting that “that People of

Color have been strong and always resisted and this isn’t new.”

Cordae also emphasized the power of Hip Hop music and culture in centering the unjust experiences of many People of Color and promoting notions of civic agency.

Cordae asserted,

Hip Hop changes the way we do citizenship. … It influences citizenship...by honestly, talking about [citizenship] or advocating for citizenship and better citizens. So, in a way, when you got these rappers talking about poverty, and over policing and police brutality, and then you see that it encourages people to go out and protest police brutality. They are changing the way we do citizenship.

In other words, Cordae described a kind of “Black critical patriotism” (Busey & Walker,

2017) within the practices of rappers/MCs. “Changing the way we do citizenship,” he positioned Hip Hop as a disruptive agent of citizenship. Thus,

Hip hoppers have the potential to raise people’s awareness. And I think hip hop, if it will challenge and renew itself in the cycles of history and social struggle, can continue to play a vital role in inspiring young folk to become politically astute human beings and citizens (Dyson, 2007, p. 86).

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For these five social studies Teachers of Color, Hip Hop brought a critical consciousness to the forefront of their student’s lives and shaped a civic agenda. By utilizing Hip Hop music and culture to inspire, galvanize and lift their student’s civic capacities, the participants elevated a discourse critical citizenship that centers the conversations, concerns, and actions of People of Color and other marginalized communities.

I belong: Hip Hop as a civic narrative of membership There is a communal connection that exists within Hip-Hop culture that facilitates the recognition and belonging of its members. The times I went to a spoken word event at a Dallas bar. The crowd nodded and laughed and snapped in unison. These are my people. In the set before Beyoncé performed at her Formation tour concert, DJ Khaled hypes up the crowd by bringing out Bun B to perform UGK’s bars of “Big Pimpin”. During his verse, Khaled cuts the sound after “Uhh...” and the crowd yells “what y’all know about them Texas boys?” These are my people. My girls and I texting each other exclaiming, “This will be our ‘hot girl summer’!” These are my people, my community, the place where I feel I belong. (Author – D. Hall)

The core of civic membership is the feeling that you are part of a community.

Notions of traditional citizenship characterize civic membership as being part of a political community as receiving full rights and fulfilling your responsibilities. In contrast, from house parties to dance halls, the essence of Hip Hop is rooted in community - its elements are meant to be performed in crowds (Chang, 2005) and its hidden transcripts are enacted as a kind of communal resistance (Rose, 1994). The performance is meant to signify physical presence and belonging. The hidden transcripts are meant to preserve and sustain your belonging. Travis and Childs (n.d.) demonstrate that this sense of belonging created through Hip Hop also increases students’ well-being.

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Thus, when the Black and Latina/o(x) participants in this study brought Hip Hop into the classroom, they made prominent the civic membership and sense of belonging paramount if not urgent to People of Color.

Antonio’s Hip Hop history class, for instance, was constructed with civic membership in mind:

I think ASTROWORLD, [my Hip Hop class], is an attempt at an act of healing because it validates people's identities. It validates the way that people conduct themselves in the world, which often doesn't look like a white person's way of conducting themselves.

As DJ Kool Herc asserts, “Hip-hop says, ‘Come as you are.’ We are a family” (in Chang,

2005, p. xi). Antonio’s ASTROWORLD class took on this family characteristic by creating a space that affirmed his students’ complex identities. This validation/recognition of identity is needed to create community, and by fostering an environment that accepts all kinds of identities, Antonio pushes back against traditional exclusionary citizenship discourses.

Additionally, if one returns to the sections describing civic identity and agency, there is ultimately a sense of what I equate with civic membership. Back in Antonio’s

ASTROWORLD class, another one of his practices brings together the convergence of civic identity, agency, and membership. Constructed in the middle of Antonio’s classroom is a concrete pillar. Using permanent markers, Antonio allows his Hip Hop history students to “tag16” the pillar with their names and other aspects of their personal

16 In graffiti, repeated use of a single symbol or series of symbols to mark territory. 219

identities, only barring profanity. That piece of classroom real estate marked a space of civic identity, agency, membership, and even resistance. The civic identities of his students are self-authored by their handwriting - saying “this is who I am.” Civic agency is marked in the physical action of writing their names even in the face of resistance -

Antonio was reprimanded for allowing his students to write on school property, so he and the students found other ways to mark their identities in the classroom and even on the same post (e.g., decorating the classroom with student designed artwork and using the ceiling). Finally, the column represents civic membership. Only students in that class were given the space to graffiti their names on that concrete post – a kind of belonging – and they made space on the column for each classmate to sign their names – a form of recognition.

Dimitriadis (2009) notes that young people “construct locally validated selves and senses of community, linked to shared notion[s] of [marginalization]” (p.2). By implementing Critical Hip Hop Pedagogical practices, Antonio centers the complex intersectional identities of his students to disrupt civic marginalization. Moreover, a part of civic membership is this sense of belonging, and because people who have been marginalized exist at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other points of difference, they position their sense of belonging at various locations (Yuval-Davis,

2006). Thus, civic membership is dynamic, and for students who, like myself, locate their

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civic membership in their racial, gender, and Hip Hop identities, classrooms that incorporate critical Hip Hop praxes feel liberatory.

DISCUSSION In this article, I examined the experiences of five in-service and pre-service

Teachers of Color to explore the ways in which Black and Latina/o(x) social studies teachers use Hip-Hop culture as a disruptive pedagogy to challenge traditional notions of citizenship and curriculum. While there are many critical renditions of citizenship (e.g.,

Dilworth, 2004; Knight & Watson, 2013; Rosaldo, 1997), I used the politics of belonging

(Yuval-Davis, 2006) which addresses notions recognition (Harris-Perry, 2011) as a framework to understand how these teachers' CHHP practices worked to ultimately trouble citizenship narratives with the social studies and construct a more inclusive understanding of citizenship.

The politics of belonging argues that marginalized communities locate their civic identity, agency, and membership in various spaces where they can be seen, heard, and understood - or recognized (Yuval-Davis, 2006). As a community-based practice, Hip

Hop can nurture and recognize the civic understandings and locations of marginalized communities. Hip Hop music and culture also resists notions of citizenship that adhere to narrow definitions of who deserves or is entitled to recognition and belonging, and lets

People of Color, women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and communities at other axes of oppression define who they are as citizens. Thus, when the teachers in this study use Hip

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Hop in their classrooms, they reimage/reconstruct citizenship and forge a critical civic- ness, a Hip Hop civic-ness.

The use of Hip Hop as a disruptive pedagogy revealed that Communities of Color and other historically marginalized peoples find civic identity, agency, and membership in narratives of resistance and community, and recognize the importance of complex identities. First, critical civic-ness suggests that civic identity emerges from the complex personhood and lived experiences of marginalized communities. Second, civic agency is vital to the critical civic-ness and the citizenship work of People of Color and other marginalized groups because it creates voice and action. Finally, critical civic-ness requires a civic membership that acknowledges that People of Color and other marginalized communities exist and belong (Yuval-Davis, 2006).

Working together, civic identity, agency and membership, create a critical civic- ness that disrupts the social studies curriculum in at least three ways. First, critical civic- ness via Hip Hop culture paints vivid portraits of a citizenry made invisible or unrecognizable within social studies. Hip Hop creates rich pictures that can be seen in the lyrics of rap songs and the fashion of its participants. It can also be recognized in the vernacular, movement, and other performative elements of its participants, ultimately resulting in a portrait and claims to the public sphere of civic-ness which cannot be easily cast aside. Rose (1994) notes that Hip Hop has “a style that cannot be easily understood or erased, a style that has the reflexivity to create counter dominant narratives against a mobile and shifting enemy” which is “the most effective ways to fortify communities of 222

resistance and simultaneously reserve the right to communal pleasure” (p. 83). As a result, marginalized communities author their civic identities for themselves and create critical civic-ness that is in your face, front and center, and refuses to be ignored. The social studies must recognize!

Moreover, the portraits performed through Hip Hop give a face to civic identity, agency, and membership. Hip Hop’s active resistance to normative identity and expression is grounded in a history of social action (e.g., Chang, 2005) - a calling out via

MCs and DJs of the oppression experienced in urban communities. Thus, Hip Hop’s fronting faces name racism, sexism, classism, while also naming resiliency and agency. It names the agency that People of Color and other marginalized peoples have and provides an avenue for these communities to push back and express themselves. The faces voice the ways in which people strive to change the democracy that they live in and affirm the worth of their communities - they attempt to make a “crooked room” straight (Harris-

Perry, 2011). In other words, the civic-ness fostered through Critical Hip Hop is not simply an abstract notion of people who exist at the shifting boundaries of citizenship. It is real and the consequences of misrecognition and exclusion are palpable.

Second, not only does Hip Hop create a portrait of critical civic-ness, it creates a complex facing portrait of civic identity, agency, and membership. CHHP centers complex intersectional identities. As a result, diversity adds richness to the portrait of civic-ness. Hip-Hop is not monolithic as it brings together communities of various backgrounds and experiences (e.g., DJ Herc in Chang, 2005; KRS-ONE, 2009). It also 223

does not paint Black and Latina/o(x) communities as victims. It is not perfect - as no one in a citizenry is. Hip Hop can engage deep, outward, complex portraits of capitalism, misogyny, sexism, and homophobia (Love, 2012; Perry, 2004), but it can also provide space for a critique of the culture and society (i.e., calling out discrimination and oppression), making way for the culture to be remade in more liberatory ways (Cooper et al., 2017). Thus, critical civic-ness constructed through CHHP can exist in undefined grays whereas the social studies is intent on existing in clear black and white.

Finally, the use of Hip Hop as a disruptive pedagogical tool in social studies has a deep appeal for teachers and students. Its popularity, its cadence, its harsh reflection of reality, and its joy are all a part of Hip Hop. Given Hip Hop culture’s resonance in the lives of urban and non-urban young people, it acts as a culturally relevant practice that can reshape the curriculum (Ladson-Billings, 2017). Democratic education is also rooted in the critical voices of young people and “hip-hop music and culture is where [young people] find their voice to participate and challenge injustice within our democratic society” (Love, 2014, p. 57). Through the civic-ness found in Hip Hop, the students can then name themselves. Thus, Hip Hop’s various cultural practices mean that its pedagogy and content are not limited to text and can be a vehicle to explore social studies in unrecognized and innovative ways (i.e., classroom graffiti to recognize marginalized students’ unique individual identities and a sense of community).

Additionally, many of the current generation of Black and Latina/o(x) teachers grew up with Hip Hop as the soundtrack of their lives (Rawls & Petchauer, 2020). 224

Bringing Hip Hop into the social studies enables these teachers to bring their civic selves into the classroom, and that in and of itself is a form of disruption. Yet, appeal does not equal disruption. Take Hamilton: An American Musical, for example, it has vast appeal and engages in small forms of disruption through representation, yet there is no critique of power. The visual dissonance of seeing Daveed Diggs, a Black man, play Thomas

Jefferson is not enough to trouble the fact that Jefferson enslaved Black Africans, and a critique of power is therefore vital to do transformative critical Hip Hop based work.

Ultimately, Hip Hop culture and music belongs to the people and its curriculum provides a “sense of belonging to a community, a feeling of entitlement, the energy to face everyday adversities and a rationale for resistance” (Silvestrini, 1997, p. 43), challenging the social studies by saying the identities of marginalized communities matter (Love, 2019).

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS I love the dance or music battles. Us kids would play a song and the old head would say “That is not real music” and play a song from their day. Then the dance battle will start with my Auntie saying, “What do you know about this young buck?” That’s how we talk.

Storytelling is always so dramatic. The stories change every time, but they are always so entertaining, and I remember every version. At the end someone will say “Brah you are putting a $20 on a $10” and everyone just laughs. That’s how we talk.

My mom is the Queen of using metaphors or analogies. She is always explaining complex issues by connecting to what I know. There is always a reference to a movie, and I walk away understanding.

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That’s how we talk.

Saturday mornings are filled with the sound of Gospel music and cleaning. It’s like I work better when I am listening to music. That’s how we talk.

When my cousins and I link up it's alway cap city. We are always busting jokes on each other. Yea someone cries but we don’t mean any harm. That’s how we talk.

I can’t leave my aunties house without talking history and current events. We talk about the power of being Black and how I need to embrace my identity. I walk away knowing I AM MY ANCESTORS WILDEST DREAM. That’s how we talk.

See in my house my voice matters, I am challenged, encouraged; its loud, connections are being made and I am allowed to be inquisitive. That’s how I talk.

So, when you ask me to sit in class and just listen to you talk at me, that’s not how I talk, so I don’t talk. Maybe I am not the problem and maybe the problem is you don’t allow me to talk the way I know how to talk.

- T. Brown, 2020, Part II

Returning to the second half of the stanzas in T. Brown’s poem, we can see how critical civic-ness lives in her work and in that of the other participants. Civic identity is made central in the last line of each stanza - “That’s how we talk,” “That’s how I talk.”

These statements let us know that who she is as a person–Black, vocal, storyteller, so on

– is defined in the preceding lines of the stanza. Her civic agency is illuminated in her claims that her “voice matters,” that she is her “ANCESTORS WILDEST DREAM,” and that she “embrace[s] her identity.” She also loudly asserts her resistance: “that’s not how

I talk,” “the power of being Black,” “I am not the problem and maybe the problem is 226

you”–and authors her identity and power. Lastly, there is civic membership and a sense of belonging that is located in her family and fictive kinships, in her Blackness, and in her

Hip Hop vernacular. It is a membership unconcerned with, and almost dismissive of,

Whiteness.

Her work is also a reminder of the importance of civic recognition and belonging in teacher education programs. Teacher education programs must work to acknowledge the critical civic-ness that lives in their teacher candidates, particularly for those from marginalized communities. They must also work to ensure teacher candidates have a strong sense of community and belonging. Teacher candidates need the space to construct not only their teacher identities but also their civic identities. For Communities of Color, both are fundamental to their pedagogical praxis.

Additionally, teacher education programs should train teachers how to create classroom spaces that recognize the cultural wealth and knowledge (Yosso, 2006) that their students bring into the classroom that can be used to nurture a critical form of civic- ness. While not the solitary way, Hip Hop is one of the cultural practices teachers should acknowledge and incorporate in a critical and intersectional way to foster their students' sense of belonging.

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Appendices

APPENDIX A

Table 1: Participants/Contexts

Participant Context Subject & Grades Race & In- Years Generation Pseudonyms Gender service/ Taught (self- Preservice selected) T. Brown - Freeman - U.S. History, Black; In-service 4 years Millennial MS 8th grade Female - 98% (she/her) Latina/o(x) - Southside ISD

Megan Pete - Philly Tech - Psychology, Black; In-service 2 years Millennial HS 10th – 11th Female - 63% grade (she/her) Latina/o(x) - U.S. History, - Eastside ISD 11th Antonio - Southeast - Hip-Hop Gay In-service 1 year Generation Ocasio Tech MS Evolution: Latino; Z (public ASTROWORLD Male charter) (Elective), 6th – (he/him) - 75% 8th grade Latina/o(x) - Southeast Schools Cordae - Jones MS - Texas History, Black; Preservice *Student Generation Dunston - 53% White; 7th grade Male teaching Z 41% (he/him) semester Latina/o(x) - Mid-City ISD Destiny - South Bank - Ethnic Studies, Latina; Preservice *Student Generation Gutiérrez HS 10th – 12th Female teaching Z - 84% grade (she/her) semester Latina/o(x) - U.S. History, - Mid-City ISD 11th grade 228

APPENDIX B

Interview Protocol Research Questions #1 - Why do Teachers of Color take-up Hip Hop culture in their social studies classrooms? #2 - How do Teachers of Color use Hip Hop culture in social studies classrooms? #3 - How does Hip Hop music and culture act as a pedagogical tool that disrupts dominant notions of citizenship and social studies?

Concept Interview Questions Crystallization Notes Race is endemic • Why do you teach Journal, lesson Check the TEKS (widespread and this (social studies)? plans, Check textbooks prolonged) – Q1 observations, (CRT – Ladson-Billings & • How do you see the field notes, Tate; Delgado & Stefancic) curriculum? What is teacher/state the narrative found generated in these different artifacts pieces of curriculum…? (Standards, textbook, testing – teacher created, school created, and state created, materials, etc.) How do you see these pieces? Students? – Q1 & Q3 • Do you think it is exclusionary (excludes people or narratives)? – Q1 & Q3 • Has the curriculum always been so problematic? – Q1 & Q3

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CRT - • Why Hip Hop? What Lesson plans Why do you use Hip Transformative/Resistance is your goal when (can foster a Hop? How does its use (Delgado & Stefancic; using Hip Hop? – Q1 degree of connect to notions of CHHP – Akom; Solórzano • How do you see resistance – transformative and & Delgado Bernal) yourself as a Solórzano & resistant pedagogies – teacher? How would Delgado transformative means I you define your Bernal), will blow this up; there role? Can Hip observations, are different degrees to Hoppers/rappers act field notes, what is transformative as change agents? – student and (look at Kevin’s article Q1 teacher artifacts about Blanca, Kent, & • What do you think Dillion). Hip Hop says about citizenship? How does/would your sense of citizenship education change with the use of Hip Hop? – Q1, Q2, & Q3 • What type of citizens do you hope to nurture? – Q1 & Q2 • When you present a narrative within Hip Hop, how do you think it fits within in curriculum? – Q1, Q2 (what do they do in class/observations), & Q3 Ordinariness of race • How else does School scope Intersectionality is also (everydayness of race – racism show up in and sequence, key – think of low- Holt; the normalization of the building? – Q1 & curriculum income students, gender, discourse (and racist Q2 resources, sexuality) discourse)– ex. ELL’s) • How do you think school policies, people (the state) observations, perceive Black and student and Brown urban teacher artifacts schools? (school leadership, other teachers at your school) – Q1, Q2, & Q3

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Centering voices of color • Why did you Observations, Also think about (experiential – experiences become a teacher? – lesson plans, intersectionality and the matter CRT) Q1 journaling, role gender, class, and • When did you fall in student and sexuality play in the love with HH? How teacher artifacts experiences of TOC; also, did it impact the some of the questions way you viewed the around race as endemic world/your identity? and transformative and – Q1 resistant • Why did you choose to take up HH? – Q1 & Q3 • What instructional practices do you think are important? – Q1, Q2, & Q3 • What have been your experiences with (administration, parents, students) as a teacher in your school? – Q2 & Q3 • What happened when you included Hip Hop in your lesson? How did (students, administrators) respond? – Q2 & Q3

Counter-storytelling • Why did you choose Lesson plan, HH is a counternarrative (Solórzano & Yosso; this song? (maybe observations, (a narrative that is Delgado, 2013) something personal student and official – Dolores Huerta) or curricular (if teacher artifacts that is laced with curricular it is really counter-stories (these talking about the singular stories; that narrative) – Q2 & Q3 people identify with) – • How did the kids there is a blurred respond? How the distinction/entanglement kids and teachers insert themselves in the songs? – Q2 & Q3

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Challenging the traditional • What do you see in Teacher Critical/feminist research research paradigms, texts, the curriculum that artifacts, lesson inquiry and theories used to is traditional and not plans, explain the experiences of critical? – Q1, Q2, & observations, people (teachers) of color Q3 journaling (CRT method – Solórzano • How do you think & Yosso; Delgado, 2013 – HH challenges the identity) traditional paradigm in social studies? – Q1, Q2, & Q3

Intersectionality (Collins & • When did you fall in Teacher Intersectionality is also Bilge; Crenshaw) – the role love with HH? How artifacts, addressed in several of of complex, dynamic, did it impact the observations, the previous questions; intersecting identities – way you viewed the journaling how these experiences how do they intersect with world/your identity? impact the pedagogical their identity and (e.g., style, music decisions these teachers understandings as choices, the way you make teachers talk/the words you use, etc.) – Q1 • Tell me about your background, where you grew up, your parents, etc. – Q1 • What were your schooling experiences like? What would you change about those experiences? What was impactful in your schooling experience? – Q1 • How do you see yourself as a teacher? How would you define your role? – Q1

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APPENDIX C

Whole Copy of “That’s How We Talk” – T. Brown (2020)

I love when my family comes over because the house is so loud and funny. That’s how we talk.

We sit at the table. Slamming cards or dominoes, talking mess, laughing, and sharing stories. That’s how we talk.

When the adults start to talk “‘grown folks’ business”, us kids have to run off. Cause as my grandma would say, “A child should know place and it’s not in grown folks’ business.” That’s how we talk.

It’s never quiet when we watch a movie. Everyone is talking to the people, making predictions, analyzing the situation, laughing, and walking around. That’s how we talk.

At the dinner table the conversation is so rich. Everyone always has something to say, we don’t have to wait to speak, we just talk. That’s how we talk.

When I am doing my homework, my mom will ask how or why this is my answer. My mom never lets me off the hook without explaining my thought process. That’s how we talk.

Sitting on the couch watching TV my Uncle will sit next to me asking, “What am I watching? How am I doing? How is school?” And give me the best advice after listening to what I had to say. That’s how we talk.

Whenever I complain my dad would say “Back in my day...” Oh gosh it’s downhill from there and we have to listen to some story that makes me think and/or laugh. That’s how we talk.

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I love the dance or music battles. Us kids would play a song and the old head would say “That is not real music” and play a song from their day. Then the dance battle will start with my Auntie saying, “What do you know about this young buck?” That’s how we talk.

Storytelling is always so dramatic. The stories change every time, but they are always so entertaining, and I remember every version. At the end someone will say “Brah you are putting a $20 on a $10” and everyone just laughs. That’s how we talk.

My mom is the Queen of using metaphors or analogies. She is always explaining complex issues by connecting to what I know. There is always a reference to a movie, and I walk away understanding. That’s how we talk.

Saturday mornings are filled with the sound of Gospel music and cleaning. It’s like I work better when I am listening to music. That’s how we talk.

When my cousins and I link up it's always cap city. We are always busting jokes on each other. Yea someone cries but we don’t mean any harm. That’s how we talk.

I can’t leave my aunties house without talking history and current events. We talk about the power of being Black and how I need to embrace my identity. I walk away knowing I AM MY ANCESTORS WILDEST DREAM. That’s how we talk.

See in my house my voice matters, I am challenged, encouraged; its loud, connections are being made and I am allowed to be inquisitive. That’s how I talk.

So, when you ask me to sit in class and just listen to you talk at me, that’s not how I talk, so I don’t talk. Maybe I am not the problem and maybe the problem is you don’t allow me to talk the way I know how to talk.

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