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Article

Starting With Style: Toward a Second Wave of Hip-Hop Education Research and Practice

Emery Petchauer1

AbstractOne fundamental breakthrough in the field of hip-hop education in recent years is the shift from understanding hip-hop solely as content to understanding hip-hop also as aesthetic form. In this article, I chart the roots of this shift across disciplines and focus on what it might mean for the future of hip-hop education, pedagogy, and research in context with urban education. I outline how this thread might become the sine qua non of an emerging second wave of hip-hop education research and practice derived primarily from aesthetic forms rather than an amalgamation of culturally relevant and critical approaches.

Keywordspopular culture, hip-hop education and pedagogy, aesthetics, style, urban education

This piece can be considered a rejoinder to a 2009 review of hip-hop education scholarship published in Review of Educational Research. There, I organized the existing hip-hop education research as I knew it according to three threads. These were (a) hip-hop-based education in reference to work that focused on various educational uses of hip-hop texts—primarily rap music; (b) hip-hop,

1Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:Emery Petchauer, Assistant Professor, Teacher Development and Educational Studies, Oakland University, 2200 N. Squirrel Road, Rochester, MI 48309, USA. Email: [email protected]

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meaning(s), and identities in reference to work that explored the complex rela-tionships that young people develop with hip-hop texts and language; and (c) hip-hop aesthetic forms in reference to work that considered the situated ways of doing and being that are salient to hip-hop—like sampling (Schloss, 2004). This final category hinged upon two critical distinctions: viewing hip-hop in an emic rather than etic way (Alim, 2006) and viewing hip-hop as form rather than content (Mansbach, 2006; Petchauer, 2011). Like others (e.g., Chang, 2006b; Schur, 2009), I used the word aesthetic to signal that one would find these “ways of doing and being” in the sonic, kinesthetic, linguistic, and visual prac-tices/expressions of hip-hop. I used the word form as well to signal that there is some sturdiness to these aesthetics across hip-hop culture(s). A statement once made to me by a college student and all-around hip-hop head encapsulates these two shifts: “I look at hip-hop as a philosophy of taking things and trans-forming things” (Petchauer, 2012a, p. 77).

Conscious of how “metaphors we live by” shape our fundamental heuris-tics (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), I called these threads because I saw them as running through three larger, separate bodies of work to the study of hip-hop in disciplines outside of education. Thus, my use of the term thread (opposed to area, body of work, subfield) was itself a heuristic to help me organize what I saw playing out in and across multiple fields. I assessed that the work located along this hip-hop aesthetic form thread indicated some unique pos-sibilities for the field but at the time lacked some necessary coherency and was thus more tentative with regard to its precise direction.

In this piece—part essay, part narrative review—I want to revisit this thread and give it more detailed attention by anchoring it to some founda-tional and (I would argue) underutilized ideas from Tricia Rose’s (1994) text, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, as well as corollary ideas in other disciplines that lend further clarity. I also want to trace this thread forward since my 2009 review by unpacking how hip-hop aesthetic forms play out in two educational initiatives. These are High School of the Recording Arts (HSRA; Seidel, 2011) and Stop Coonin’ Movement (SCM; Irby & Petchauer, 2011). Finally, I focus on what this thread might mean for the future of hip-hop education, pedagogy, and research in context with urban education. I outline how this thread could be the sine qua non of an emerging second wave of hip-hop education research and practice derived primarily from aesthetic forms rather than an amalgamation of culturally rel-evant, critical, and youth-oriented approaches that has characterized much of the important hip-hop education research and practice (see Alim, 2011, for another helpful review).

As I proceed, I keep with this language of thread for two affordances it lends to my analysis. First, I conceptualize this thread of scholarship as



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tethered to a foundation, mainly key sections of Rose (1994) in which she touches on style and hip-hop principles as “a potential blueprint for social resistance and affirmation” (p. 39). I consider these early ideas from Rose as a significant anchor for this thread and for my analysis more broadly. Second, this metaphor also fits my stance that a transdisciplinary approach that makes clear links to fields well outside of education and education subfields holds much promise to make this thread more useful for analytical and educative purposes. These disciplines go as far as ethnomusicology (Gaunt, 2006; Schloss, 2004), property law (Schur, 2009), philosophical aesthetics (Shusterman, 1991), and beyond (Porfilio, Roychoudhury, & Gardner, 2014). Traversing across disciplines such as these means navigating instances in which scholars use different lexicons and theoretical frameworks to describe similar characteristics (e.g., rupture in Rose, 1994, and asymmetry in Schur, 2009), or when scholars use the same term to describe altogether different processes. The term irony often receives this confounded treatment. Consequently, much translation across scholarly disciplines is necessary to pinpoint the coherency of hip-hop aesthetics for education.

My stance also requires acknowledging that there are indispensable sources of knowledge with regard to hip-hop aesthetics outside of academe and its related modes of circulation (e.g., academic journals and presses). This work includes three volumes of hiphopography pioneered by James Spady pub-lished through independent presses (Spady, Dupree, & Lee, 1995; Spady & Eure, 1991; Spady, Lee, & Alim, 1999) as well as numerous oral histories and artifacts in photography books that predate most academic scholarship on hip-hop (e.g., Chalfant & Prigoff, 1987). Unencumbered by academe, some of these works provide a level of access, nuance, and visual representation that surpasses much academic work. Acker’s (2013) FLIP THE SCRIPT: A Guidebook for Aspiring Vandals and Typographers is one recent example. These are underutilized resources that scholars can tap to theorize hip-hop as seriously as any other theoretical framework that grounds an analysis.

Given what I have outlined above, my approach to this task requires a significant departure from the field of education in roughly the first half of this article before circling back to education the second half. I feel we, as education scholars, have much more to learn from hip-hop.

Starting With Style: Toward a Coherent System of Hip-Hop Aesthetic Forms

The culture we now call hip-hop crystalized in the midst of real and symbolic destruction at multiple scales of urban ecology. This destruction, which has



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received much attention in Rose (1994) and Chang (2005), ranged from trick-ledown economics to the demolition and displacement of sturdy working-class and ethnic neighborhoods in New York City due to projects like the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway. Rose (1994) pinpoints this con-text with respect to what is considered the genesis of hip-hop:

Hip-hop culture emerged as a source for youth of alternative identity formation and social status in a community whose older local support institutions had been all but demolished along with large sectors of its build environment. (p. 34)

With this statement, Rose alludes to the fact that the post-industrial South Bronx and New York City more broadly is one of the last places one would expect to be fertile soil for hip-hop to bud. This includes hip-hop as the mul-tibillion-dollar entertainment industry and as the cohesive framework of cul-tural praxis that people have taken up in every inhabited continent. How could this happen in midst of real and symbolic devastation?

The answer to this question resides at the level of style. Style, of course, has been a key site of analysis across cultural studies and popular culture for some time. For Rose (1994), style entails “shared approaches to sound and motion found in the Afrodiaspora” (p. 38) that are evident across the expres-sive elements of hip-hop. These include flow, layering, ruptures in lines, and more. I unpack some of the more salient “shared approaches” in the follow-ing subsections.

Sampling and Layering

Scholars from various theoretical positions have identified sampling as an aesthetic form in hip-hop culture. In one of the earliest of these analyses, Shusterman (1991), writing from philosophical aesthetics, frames that “artis-tic appropriation is the historical source of hip-hop music and still remains the core of its technique and a central feature of its aesthetic form and mes-sage” (p. 614). Like many early analyses, Shusterman’s unit of analysis is the hip-hop song, treating it as a text. With the more recent move toward ethno-graphic and grounded approaches to hip-hop, Schloss (2004) unpacks how sampling is a primary means of hip-hop music creation writ large. This is done by taking pieces of previously recorded music (usually from vinyl records) by using a digital instrument (called a sampler) and piecing them together with a variety of techniques to create an instrumental track. These snippets of previously recorded music often include a drum, horn, or piano section, and virtually anything else. Like other aesthetics, it also coheres with prior Black and Afrodiasporic artistic qualities (e.g., Bartlett, 1994).




Although sampling has received most attention as a sonic production tech-nique, this act of creative appropriation exists across hip-hop as a larger framework. Casting sampling in this larger light, Schur (2009) describes it as “a creative method or framework [that] bridges the acts of consumption and production. It requires cultural workers to rearrange the symbols, phrases, rhythms, and melodies circulating within American culture into something completely new” (p. 46). Understanding sampling as a broader creative framework helps identify acts of consumption and creation beyond the sonic realm, such as dance with b-boying/b-girling, wherein an essential quality is for a dancer to sample from a liberal continuum of culture sources (e.g., mar-tial arts movies, comic books, fictional and historical characters) to add char-acter, humor, and even stylistic controlling metaphors to their dance (Schloss, 2009). A style such as this gains one recognition according to the culture’s rubrics and simultaneously renders one indecipherable to observers not familiar with the cultural norms.1

Literally, sampling is also a way to understand the creative framework through which the actual physical aspects of the dance formed. Toprock, an aspect of b-boying/b-girling that is performed standing up, is one clear exam-ple. Dancer, dance historian, and cultural elder Pabon (2006) explains how the intact form of toprock is due to sampling: “Toprockin’s structure and form fuse dance forms and influences from uprocking, tap, lindy hop, James Brown’s ‘good foot,’ salsa, Afro-Cuban, and various African and Native American dances” (p. 20).

Hip-hop aesthetics like sampling are a product of practical decisions that people made in specific contexts; in many cases, these people were working-class or “low-income” teenagers in New York City. As Rose (1994) notes, few economic, employment, recreational, and artistic opportunities were available to youth coming of age in the post-industrial Bronx, “but each of them found ways to become famous as an entertainer by appropriating the most advanced technologies and emerging cultural forms” (p. 35, emphasis added). Consequently, these creative innovations through sampling took place because of restricted circumstances and not in spite of them. Oral his-tories with many cultural pioneers underscore this point too: As youth, they rather haphazardly took what they saw around them, made it their own, gave it new names, and put it together anew because it was something fun and that they could control.2

If sampling is the creative process that garners material, layering is what is done with them. Rose (1994) highlights layering across hip-hop elements, such as rappers layering the meanings of words in songs, even across differ-ent languages and language variations (Alim, 2011; Pennycook, 2005). Rose also notes how (graffiti3) writers add layers to their pieces to shroud their



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identification to untrained eyes and to add style. This is a difficult process to represent with the written word alone. As an aid, Figure 1 illustrates a three-stage progression of a simple piece of the letters HIM. This progression illus-trates (a) additional layers behind and around the letters HIM as well as (b) additional ruptures to the lines of the letters (a topic I will address in the fol-lowing section). As the layers around, behind, and about the letters increase in volume and complexity, the letters of the piece become less legible to eyes

Figure 1. Three-stage progression of piece.




unlearned in this aesthetic. In fact, the final image might not be legible as HIM to viewers who are not graf-literate (i.e., literate to the handstyles and lettering methods) without the scaffolding of the previous two versions. Like many aesthetics in hip-hop, layering is a tributary of earlier African American artistic practices. Schur (2009) notes that layering dates back well over a century to the strip quilt and other designs with similar approaches (see Kiracofe, 1993). This connection to the strip quilt underscores that style in this tradition is often a product of function.

Sonically, one way of understanding layering is through the use of a mix-ing board. It allows a producer to mix samples together in various capacities and combinations through different channels. Hank Shocklee, part of the leg-endary Bomb Squad production team, unpacks these effects (and affects) that happen through layering.

It might be a synthesis of jungle rhythm, funk guitar, rock organ. When two sounds are put together, they create a third sound. Rhythms collide to create new rhythms. The mix radiates back to the listener. They probably did not feel the individual samples. The astute might recognize some of the samples, but even they were feeling this other vibration [created by the collision of sounds]. This is exactly why sampling music is so fascinating. (Allen, 2006, p. 72, brackets in original)

Shocklee pinpoints that layering is generative. A collision of samples that are layered together has different effects and affects, some of which are unpredictable vibrations.

More recent work from the standpoint of hip-hop feminism (Durham, Cooper, & Morris, 2013; Morgan, 1999) helps push Shocklee’s ruminations about how these layers, juxtapositions, and collisions work past sonic realms and into ideological and political ones. Here the notion of percussive femi-nism vis-à-vis the Crunk Feminist Collective is helpful.

The [Crunk Feminist Collective] argues that the tension between competing and often contradictory political and cultural projects like hip-hop and feminism is percussive in that it is both disruptive and generative. Percussive feminism allows for the creativity that ensues from placing modes or objects of inquiry together that might not traditionally fit, hip-hop and feminism being only the most obvious example. (Durham et al., 2013, p. 724)

This percussion is a type of wreck that Pough (2004) theorizes Black women have used in rhetoric and performance to disrupt beliefs, images, and stereotypes about them:



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Bringing wreck . . . has meant reshaping the public gaze in such a way as to be recognized as human beings—as functioning and worthwhile members of society—and not to be shut out of or pushed away from the public sphere. (p. 17)

These connections to disruption, generativeness, and wreck signal that aesthetics can be more than sonic or artistic abstractions. They can also be political, ideological, and educational heuristics with manifestations in real places and among real people, as I hope to demonstrate below.

Flow and Rupture

Although layering is what is done to the samples, the purpose of this process is not to create a unified product whose parts are seamlessly indistinguishable from one another—a “pure” organic whole. Samples that are layered together indeed flow together, and this flow in hip-hop music and language is a key attribute (Krims, 2000). However, as Shusterman (1991) argues, ruptures to flow (what he calls cutting and temporality) are also evident throughout hip-hop, and participants/creators of hip-hop expect and celebrate these ruptures.

Schur (2009) correctly pairs flow with ruptures (i.e., asymmetry in his work) because a rupture is a break in flow. In other words, flow must be established for rupture to take place. Consequently, the two should be under-stood in conjunction with one another. This pairing pertains to the interrup-tion of a sonic pattern – such as the vital role of the break in hip-hop – but also sonic interruptions in the middle of songs (Rose, 1994). This practice taken to an extreme in hip-hop musicianship results in beat juggling, an aspect of turntablism, wherein a DJ uses two copies of the same record to manually deconstruct a beat down to its basic parts and then artfully reconstruct them into a new form appreciated by listeners (see Pray, 2001).

Forms of dance in hip-hop also illustrate the relationship between flow and rupture. Pioneering dancer and choreographer Rennie Harris uses the crooked line as a metaphor for historical African American approaches to art and its contrast with the straight lines characteristic of some European dances such as ballet:

That crooked line. That fucking offbeat, that twist, that’s what the hepcats did, that lean. That walk . . . To me, when you’re talking about African American history in this country, we’re talking about that crooked line. You wanna see who Black people is? That diagonal right there. (Chang, 2006a, p. 66)

Harris’s use of the crooked line metaphor is also relevant to what is valued within the rubric of hip-hop dance and other expressions: extreme individual




style. In European dances such as ballet, one is not valued for how they can deviate from the normed contours of the dance or differ in stylistic adaptation from other dancers. In many ways, the opposite is true in b-boying and b-girling. One’s recognition and value within the dance’s rubric increases with the individuality and uniqueness of their style,4 and this emphasis on individual creativity and innovation is woven into the dance in many ways (Schloss, 2009).

The crooked line as Harris describes is also a literal quality of lettering in graffiti. This is perhaps the most illustrative site of rupture. A definitive char-acteristic of a writer’s style is how one breaks the lines that make up letters in the 26-character Roman alphabet. Recalling the images in Figure 1, they illustrate a progression of breaks in the lines of the letters in HIM. Imposing bends, breaks, sharp angles like razors, and other forms of rupture upon the lines are key characteristics that make one’s style distinct and recognizable to other artists. It is not uncommon to hear writers attribute a particular series of breaks in a letter to a writer because of how he or she “freaked it.”5 Paradoxically, like the layers behind and around a piece, these ruptures in letters also make pieces unrecognizable and “low art” to outsiders without visual literacy to read the ruptures. In other words, ruptures in lines are what make pieces legible to insiders and illegible to outsiders. Visibility and legi-bility are not the same things. This notion of legibility/illegibility is a point I will discuss further with regard to SCM below.

Affect, Performance, and Embodiment

Scholars operating from a number of different theoretical orientations have located affective engagement, performance, and embodiment at the center of hip-hop. This nexus of affect underscores the quality that hip-hop is funda-mentally a participatory culture. One does something to be down and embod-ies hip-hop by what they do. This manifests most directly in the traditional elements of hip-hop. Within breaking, pioneering dancer Ken Swift has referred this as the “go off moment,” or the instance when someone erupts (i.e., breaks) in response to the climatic point of music (Schloss, 2009). Williams (2007) pushes for a necessary expansion beyond this traditional elemental definition of hip-hop by noting that there are also organizational roles that are equally participatory and vital beyond the traditional four ele-ments. Extending arguments from Richardson (2002), Pough (2004) high-lights that Black women have long been multimodal and unbound to a particular genre in their expressive-political tools, and this carries over into hip-hop participation as well with regard to organizing, curating, promoting, and more.



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Gaunt’s (2006) ethnomusicology scholarship on Black girl games such as Double Dutch illustrates the depth and complexity of embodiment. She builds upon the prior notion of kinetic orality (Gilroy, 1993; West, 1989) to argue that rhythm, gesture, and movement are vital units of analysis: “I am referring to the transmission and appropriation of musical ideals and social memories passed on jointly by word of mouth and by embodied musical ges-tures and formulas” (Gaunt, 2006, pp. 3-4). This focus points to how embod-ied practices for children and adults are not only play but also entail learning about and taking on identities—racialized, gendered, and otherwise.

Emphasizing these performative and embodied foundations has been a significant contribution of hip-hop feminism (Durham et al., 2013; Morgan, 1999) and hip-hop feminist pedagogy more specifically (Brown, 2008; Brown & Kwakye, 2012). This contribution has been a corrective in many ways to analyses that are necessarily entangled with the commoditized layer of hip-hop culture. Potter (1995)—writing from a post-modern stance—is instructive here. He pinpoints that the release of “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979 (what is often considered the “first” hip-hop song) was in its essence a suc-cessful attempt to package, distribute, and sell something that before had only taken place through live performance in reclaimed community spaces. Potter notes, “Hip-hop was something goin’ down at 23 Park . . . you could no more make a hip-hop record in 1979 than you could make a ‘basketball game’ record or a ‘subway ride’ record” (p. 45). Potter’s point is that all hip-hop expressions were live, temporally unique, and took place in specific places, at specific times, with specific people.

The performative corrective by way of hip-hop feminism peals back these layers of commercialization to an earlier, pre-commoditized, live hip-hop. Brown and Kwakye (2012) note how hip-hop feminist pedagogy occurs when they dance, walk down the street, integrate lyrics into everyday speech, and debate about hip-hop. These are embodied ways of doing hip-hop. For them, hip-hop feminist pedagogy relies upon performance-based cultural criticism and “is located and interpreted through the community (or commu-nities) in which it is immersed” (Brown & Kwakye, 2012, p. 4). They note in the introduction to their hip-hop feminist pedagogy reader, Wish to Live, “in as much as possible, we would like you to participate. Read and perform out loud and in community the creative works in this book” (p. 5, emphasis added). These kinds of performances, particularly in public spaces, are tools that bring disruption and wreck (Pough, 2004).

Other theoretical entry points signal performance and embodiment as well. From the philosophical stance of pragmatist aesthetics, Kline (2007) focuses on affect in hip-hop culture through the concept of kinetic consump-tion, noting that “hip-hop is meant to be felt and not to be just seen and/or




heard” (p. 55). Kline outlines how the means of participating in hip-hop most often entail affective response, whether this is dance, nodding one’s head, or scrunching one’s face at the sound of a moving beat. Almost uniformly in hip-hop spaces, if folks are not moving something, something is wrong.

As noted in Petchauer (2011), the various foci on affect in hip-hop have rich connections to an African-centered epistemology. From this orientation, emotional and affective experiences are valid ways of engaging with and knowing the world (Akbar, 1984; Asante, 1988). This is an abrupt contrast to a Eurocentric and Enlightenment epistemology that positions distance, ratio-nality, and reason as the primary ways of knowing. This connection to African-centered epistemology makes sense, of course, give hip-hop’s clear connections to other Afrodiasporic arts and expressions (Gaunt, 2006).

Summary: From Technique to Tactic

The above sections draw from various theoretical frameworks to unpack some of the more salient aesthetic forms across hip-hop. My anchor for this analysis has been Rose (1994), yet her work also propels me into the second half of this piece and a move back to education. Referring to flow, layering, and ruptures, Rose cues one to imagine what might come by projecting these beyond dance, graffiti, rhyming, and hip-hop entirely.

Let us imagine these hip hop principles as a blueprint for social resistance and affirmation: create sustaining narratives, accumulate them, layer, embellish, and transform them. However, be also prepared for rupture, find pleasure in it, in fact, plan on social rupture. When these ruptures occur, use them in creative ways that will prepare you for a future in which survival will demand a sudden shift in ground tactics. (Rose, 1994, p. 39, emphasis in original)

Rose considers layering and accumulating narratives, preparing for and planning on ruptures, and using all of these as tactics. In her analysis, these build a style nobody can deal with—“a style that cannot be easily understood or erased, a style that has the reflexivity to create counterdominant narratives against a mobile and shifting enemy” (Rose, 1994, p. 61). If we take Rose’s charge and imagine hip-hop aesthetics as a blueprint, what might these mean transposed into education? How do we operationalize sampling, layering, ruptures, wreck, percussive disruption, and the like in classrooms or at the programmatic level? Pushing beyond techniques that teach skills and con-tent, how can these work to resist contemporary pressures to dismantle urban schools systems through divestment, privatization, and broader corporate takeover? How can they move from techniques we see in hip-hop to tactics of



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resistance? If these aesthetics make up a style nobody can deal with, how might we imagine a pedagogy nobody can deal with?

Two Tentative Cases

In this section, I offer close readings of two educational initiatives that begin to sketch some answers to the above questions. I unpack how some hip-hop aesthetic forms are at work in HSRA in St. Paul, Minnesota (Seidel, 2011), and a street-level, critical education initiative in Philadelphia called Stop Coonin’ Movement (Irby & Petchauer, 2011). HSRA illustrates some direct and deliberate application of hip-hop aesthetics to a school environment. These direct applications work as a foundation to see the more complex and tacit uses of hip-hop aesthetics in SCM. These two initiatives are not bal-anced representations of each subsection above, and they are not “replicable models” without weaknesses. They are, however, examples from real spaces of what aesthetics look like in practice and should spark explorations about other ways that the principles outlined above might create pedagogies nobody can deal with.

Hip-Hop Genius: High School of the Recording Arts

In Hip Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education, Seidel (2011) pro-vides a rich portrait of HSRA in St. Paul, Minnesota. The school began as a pilot program in 1996 and was granted a charter in 1998. The school cur-rently enrolls approximately 200 students, the majority of which are students of color and come to HSRA after having been pushed out of a traditional school or decided to discontinue schooling altogether. Ninety-two percent of the student body qualifies for free or reduced lunch (HSRA, 2013).

HSRA is colloquially referred to as “Hip Hop High” because a centerpiece of the school is Studio 4, a professional-level recording studio with equip-ment appropriated from a defunct street-oriented studio appropriately named Down 4 Dirt. The studio is a centerpiece of many educative aspects of the school including a student-run record label and a weekly school-wide perfor-mance and recognition event. Other curricular aspects that generate from stu-dio projects include securing contracts, promotions, copyrights, and other duties that surround any professional music product.

Although Studio 4 is an integral component of HSRA and a reason why the school is often called Hip Hop High, Seidel (2011) details that what is most fundamentally hip-hop about HSRA is neither the recording studio nor the rap music that some students produce in it. Rather, it is the sensibilities and aesthetics of hip-hop—such as sampling, creative resourcefulness, and




innovation due to limited resources and circumstances—infused into the organization and operation of the school. He uses the term Hip Hop Genius (a term that generated from the founders of the school and others stakehold-ers) to describe the application of hip-hop aesthetic forms to the design and function of the school.

Embodying Hip-Hop Genius in an educational setting is deeper and more complex than bringing a rap song into an English class, painting a graffiti mural in a hallway, or inviting a breakdance troupe to a school assembly. It involved rethinking the very ways in which learning occurs. (Seidel, 2011, p. 13)

One of the most direct ways that HSRA operates by hip-hop aesthetics is through sampling and appropriation. Most specifically, at work in HSRA is the aspect of sampling that thrives on innovation due to limited resources or “flipping” the use of an object from its original function into one that fits a different and more pressing need. In a material sense, the school has been built through sampling and appropriation due to the means of acquiring Studio 4, as discussed earlier. This “flip-hop” approach (as Seidel calls it) is a stark contrast to initiatives in some urban districts that hinge upon putting the newest products and technologies of industry giants such as Microsoft into the hands of students (who are potential lifelong consumers).

Beyond establishing Studio 4 at HSRA, sampling is also the impetus behind the broad pedagogical model of the school.

HSRA has taken this approach [i.e., sampling and reassembling] and implemented it in the field of education. The founders of the school do not claim to have invented the educational and youth development practices at play within the school. Rather, they are proud of the ways in which they have sampled, mixed, screwed, and chopped a medley of innovative approaches to education, entrepreneurship, artistic production, youth development, and the provision of support services. (Seidel, 2011, p. 21)

The “medley of innovative approaches” that the leaders have used include project-based learning, advisories with adult allies, authentic assessments, youth empowerment activities, and an overall framework of asset-based community development. Students can earn credits and demonstrate compe-tencies to graduate in different ways: (a) workshops led by staff or commu-nity members that require students to create a real-world product; (b) daily blocks of class time devoted to disciplines such as mathematics, reading, and language arts; (c) guided study packets; (d) free college courses through the state’s Post-Secondary Educational Option; and (e) project-based learning in individual and group formats that center on the scientific, linguistic, and



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social intersections of music products. This latter option is the most popular and consistent means of earning credits among students.

In addition to these more programmatic features, Seidel (2011) pinpoints deliberate patience as an ethos of the school. Many students at the school are exposed to stressors outside of school. These may be abusive situations, trauma, work obligations, or unstable living conditions. Given these situa-tions, the physiological reality is that many of them arrive tired, hungry, or on edge at different and unpredictable times during the year. These situations and their consequences could be considered social ruptures: breaks in the even flow of living that more privileged and economically stable students enjoy. Deliberate patience anticipates these ruptures that occur in students’ lives. The practice entails giving individual students time to get their thoughts and emotions together, meditate for a moment, or transition between activi-ties much slower than the teacher may desire. There is clearly an art and bal-ance to deliberate patience. But, realizing that many of their students come from situations that have physiological and psychological tolls, the staff puts this into practice to anticipate these ruptures.

Seidel (2011) pushes beyond simply anticipating the ruptures in students’ lives to theorizing about how ruptures can become a defining and fortifying quality of the school. School founder David “TC” Ellis remarks—part in jest, part in seriousness—about not wanting to have conflict with any more stu-dents at the school because he ends up hiring them as staff: “If you fight ’em, you end up hiring ’em. Every student I’ve beefed with has ended up working here. We ain’t got enough positions for me to fight any more students” (Seidel, 2011, p. 93). Seidel tells one story of a student, Codie, who misun-derstood discipline at the school for permanent banishment. Due to a trau-matic upbringing and the ways that other male role models had let Codie down, he lashed out at TC, fighting him at a gas station and promising to shoot him with a gun the next time he saw TC. Believing Codie at his word, TC filed a Protection Order with his registered handgun and alerted Codie’s older brother that he was ready to defend himself with deadly force if Codie were to follow through on his promise. Honoring a code of the streets, TC did not go to the police for protection nor for them to apprehend Codie.

Codie would leave the state for a few years but eventually returned and was told by a street mentor who respected TC to make things right. He did, and this allowed him to reenroll and graduate. Much later, TC hired Codie as a security guard and utility personnel at the school. The mended rift between TC and Codie as well as the lore of it in the school created a deeper level of commitment and a lived proof of redemption and healing for students. Seidel (2011) illustrates that this case is emblematic of the larger approach that HSRA takes to staff and relationships. Although not all ruptured relationships




have idyllic endings, a quality of the school is to anticipate them (if not expect them) and view them as opportunities to fortify the institution. This approach to using social ruptures at opportunities for strength is a dramatic contrast to the more frequent methods of exclusion and punishment that contribute to school-to-prison pipelines.

In narrating HSRA with respect to hip-hop aesthetics, I should be careful not to portray it in an uncritical and romanticized way. Paris and Alim (2014) ask, “What happens with Ill-Literacies get ill?” (p. 92) to push back against the trend in youth culture-oriented scholarship to uncritically represent the cultural and potentially-transgressive practices of youth. This point is rele-vant to my treatment of HSRA as well. Although the practices fit under a general student-centered framework, there are also elements of HSRA that conflict with it in varying degrees, if not directly. Sampling from different educational approaches and flipping them for different purposes can produce conflict within the mostly student-centered framework. In my reading of HSRA, behaviorism is also a salient quality. The recording studio is an inte-gral part of learning in the school, but students also earn an “all access pass” to the studio for attendance and academic records that are in good standing. As Kohn (1993) illustrates in Punished by Rewards, an incentivized system like this, at its core, operates by the chief maxim of behaviorism: do this and you’ll get that. It tends to disassociate students with the learning process and can place students and teachers into adversarial relationships. In fact, the initial conflict with Codie previously alluded to started over the “reward” of studio time. Practices generating from this approach conflict with the more student-centered practice of deliberate patience.

Hustling Consciousness: Stop Coonin’ Movement

If HSRA is an attempt to employ hip-hop aesthetics as a way to remix school, SCM represents a disregard for the school setting in favor a public space that has fewer constraints to hip-hop aesthetics: the streets. SCM is a street-level, critical media literacy education initiative that began in Philadelphia and spread to other cities such as Oakland, California; Toronto, Canada; and Greenville, South Carolina. As detailed in Irby and Petchauer (2011), SCM began in 2004 from a concern by four community educators in Philadelphia about the misrepresentations of Blacks prevalent in global media, and a per-ceived absence of critical analysis of these images by the Black youth most misrepresented by them. The movement revolved around primarily Black youth in Philadelphia “hustling” T-shirts and buttons that featured exagger-ated and likely offensive blackface “coon” caricatures targeted against spe-cific typologies of misrepresented Blackness. Hustling in this way meant not



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only selling the products but also having the ability to engage in a critical conversation about the image, whether for the purpose of selling the shirt or when questioned about what it meant (most often) by an adult. The coon cari-catures included Pimp Coon designed to “question the mainstreaming of pimp culture, the degradation of women, and passive acceptance of pimping in the hip-hop community” (Irby & Petchauer, 2011, p. 309). Similarly, Killa Coon was targeted against thug and gangster portrayals that glorified vio-lence in Black communities. The caricatures were encircled and diagonally “crossed out” in red with the phrase/web address www.stopcoonin.com under them (see Figure 2). The movement was framed by an understanding of min-strelsy and cooning, wherein a Black actor would dress up in blackface and perform dehumanizing and racist acts for White audiences (see Lott, 1995). The organizers of SCM saw it that contemporary versions of cooning were (and are) still prevalent through global entertainment channels, and having youth hustle the products was a way for them to enact critical conversations about the historical and contemporary meanings of these images (see Irby & Petchauer, 2011, for a fuller description).

Hip-hop aesthetic forms were the scaffolding upon which founders tacitly built SCM. Three facets of the movement illustrate this most clearly: (a) the design of the coon caricature products, (b) the intended effects it generated while youth were hustling them, and (c) the covert network of product distri-bution. Together, these qualities helped anticipate some of the ways that ini-tiatives like SCM often fail and protected against these potential failures.

Figure 2. Pimp Coon design, image, and shirt.


www.stopcoonin.com



Oftentimes, initiatives like SCM fail when they are infiltrated and appropri-ated by groups who are different along the lines of race, age, or social loca-tion compared with the youth who are central to the movement. In a case like SCM, these groups would be adults, White youth, or youth who did not have the same urban and street affiliation as SCM associates. Like the ruptures and layers of a graffiti piece, hip-hop aesthetic forms helped create a system that was internally legible to SCM members but difficult to understand and pen-etrate by outsiders who might threaten the longevity of it.

Participation and affect were integral to design of the SCM. As detailed by Irby and Petchauer (2011), the movement looked at selling the products as an act of hustling consciousness. Neighborhood youth who demonstrated a basic understanding of the images through critical conversations with adult allies were given three shirts—one to wear and two to sell. They were encouraged to wear the shirt as a way to initiate conversations with people about Blackness, media, and representation. Upon selling the shirts through their own peer networks (neighborhoods, schools, streets), the youth keep the profits but were also able to purchase more shirts at a much discounted price to hustle further. In this manner, hustling the product and the ideas imbedded within it was beneficial to youth in a material sense.

Participation was not limited to hustling shirts and buttons, however. As the program grew informally and youth were successful, they could move up through some loose ranks and have more autonomy and leadership, eventu-ally becoming “Neighborhood Hope Dealers” who developed their own criti-cal educational materials and distribution networks. From this loose system, a person could not go into a store and buy a Pimp Coon shirt; you had to find and purchase one in a hand-to-hand transaction from youth operating in their networks. When SCM did expand to have some online presence and distrib-ute products via postal mail, shirts arrived in a plain envelope with the SCM logo and no return address. The only identifying information included was a short, anonymous pamphlet encouraging the purchaser to wear their new Pimp Coon shirt to initiate conversations with people and start a movement of their own.

This brief sketch of the movement’s loose and informal organization sig-nals the ways that it anticipated and was armed against some of ruptures that derail many parallel educational initiatives. These ruptures include loss of funding, loss of physical facilities such as a building, changes in staff, and being shut down due to achievement or under enrollment—the kinds of rup-tures that HSRA and other school-based initiatives must consider. SCM was protected against these because it operated unconnected to any formal educa-tional system and constraints, which was an intentional move by founders. Irby and Petchauer (2011) note that the physical space required by SCM was



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a basement to store shirts, it largely funded itself through the informal street-level economy because youth sold products, and it had no formal staff. Equally important is that this system of distribution helped ensure that youth and not adults would be the face of the movement. The few adult allies were largely invisible. In addition, the decentralized system of organization (or lack thereof) made SCM difficult to pinpoint and identify. People who were not already operating in the street-level economies and networks of these youth could not easily get a shirt. This system set up intentional boundaries for who could be down with SCM.

Affect was also paramount to the coon images that the founders con-sciously developed. After informally testing out different images, they selected ones that elicited the strongest responses—whether those responses were shock, confusion, offense, or approval. The images were designed to make people feel, and that feeling was hoped to start a conversation. As a comparison, text on a shirt—such as a quotation from Malcolm X—typically does not elicit an affective response as immediately and directly as an image. An image like Pimp Coon can confound and disrupt. In addition, an absurd cartoonish image widened the audience of reaction because it did not rely on any text-based literacy skill.

The affect intended by the images at their core, however, was a product of sampling and layering. Looking at the Pimp Coon image, specific aspects of it were sampled from contemporary popular culture and historical minstrelsy to elicit affects. These aspects included the stereotypical pimp hat with feather, the gold pimp juice goblet, and a gold fashion grill made outlandish with a dollar sign. Each of these was a main fixture of many commercial rap videos in the mid-2000s and helped normalize pimping (particularly in Black communities) in the popular imagination. Appearing on a blackface coon with bulging eyes, an exaggerated smile, and white gloves juxtaposed these details against minstrelsy entertainment. This juxtaposition created an oppor-tunity to make the critical connection between hip-hop and minstrelsy enter-tainment industries.

Recalling Shocklee’s description of sampling and layering discussed pre-viously, a collision of samples that are layered together has different effects and affects, some of which are unpredictable vibrations. Moving beyond the sonic realm, wreck (Pough, 2004) and percussive disruption (Durham et al., 2013) help unpack how the image worked particularly with regard to the final layer upon which these pimp and coon images were presented: the racialized appearance of the person wearing the shirt. This without a doubt was the most important layer to the percussive affect of the image and how it helped pro-tect SCM from losing some of its subcultural capital and being co-opted by groups not central to its mission. Some Black youth who wore shirts received




disapproving responses from Black elders in their communities. Given that it was Black youth wearing the coon images, some Black elders felt the youth should “know better.” Putting youth in a position to defend the idea and prod-uct to their elders through an intergenerational conversation was, of course, intended by SCM founders. Once again, percussion is generative. But the potential for products to be disapproved and misunderstood by adults also endowed SCM with some level of subcultural capital that might carve out space for youth who did not pull up their pants (literally and figuratively) so they could fit into youth leadership initiatives or roles sanctioned by schools and adults.

For White youth or youth who occupied very different spaces than the Black youth selling shirts, the percussive affect was intended to be much dif-ferent. Like the cryptic system of product distribution, the percussive affect of the coon image against white skin was intended to disrupt who could be down with SCM. White youth could certainly wear the shirt if they could obtain one through the network, but a blackface coon caricature shirt juxta-posed on a white body has a different affect. If Black youth could be chal-lenged by elders because they should know better, White youth wearing a product could be suspected of being outright racists. White youth who could locate a product could certainly be down with SCM, hustle the product/idea, or defend their involvement. But there was a different set of stakes for them compared with Black youth.

SCM founders intended to disrupt the boundaries of participation along racial lines because of how Black-oriented products can be easily appropri-ated and gentrified. A quick way to end a movement like SCM that is geared toward street-oriented Black youth and that thrives on this kind of subcultural capital would be to open the doors wide for White and non-street oriented youth. This is often the trajectory of styles, language variations, and fashion that originate with Black and urban youth: They relinquish these styles once other groups (be they White, suburban, adult, or something else) adopt them. Using hip-hop aesthetic forms was an attempt to create a movement that could not be dealt with in the ways that other youth initiatives often are.

Toward a Second Wave of Hip-Hop Education Research and Practice

My reading of HSRA and SCM in the previous section illustrates some of the ways that hip-hop aesthetic forms take shape in real educational spaces. In these two cases, aesthetics like sampling and layering operated more at the level of organization than classroom pedagogy. In this final section, I want to



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move away from these two cases and attend to a conception of hip-hop edu-cation research and practice derived primarily (and perhaps singularly) from aesthetic forms. As I noted at the start of this piece, locating aesthetic forms as the sine qua non of this second wave is a departure from the culturally relevant and critical approaches that have animated—almost exclusively—a first wave of hip-hop education and pedagogy. To be clear, the body of schol-arship in my estimation has not been misguided; rather, as Ladson-Billings (2014) notes, it has been a natural progression or remix of culturally relevant pedagogies. However, my sense is that there can be much more in both prac-tice and research.

With regard to practice, this second wave can push for manifestations of hip-hop education and pedagogy derived primarily from aesthetic forms. Already, there has been a discernable movement in the field particularly with regard to sampling, the most commonly identified aesthetic. In different capacities, scholars have connected sampling to aspects of writing (Craig, 2013; Peterson, 2013; Rice, 2003), urban school memories (Petchauer, 2012b), leadership development (Wilson, 2013), youth activism (Clay, 2012), and pedagogy in graphic design (Kaiser, in press). Digging deeper beyond sampling, scholars have applied the modes of engagement evident in hip-hop spaces (i.e., cyphers) to classrooms. These modes include affective connec-tion to social justice pedagogies (Petchauer, 2011) and collaborative-compe-tition or battling among students in science (Emdin, 2013). The salience of aesthetics varies among these works, as does its relevance to a specific edu-cational outcome. Rice’s application of sampling is largely haphazard, with students sampling “whatever” into composition and then probing for what it might mean. Kaiser’s application of sampling (and other ideas associated with DJing) is more tightly linked to desired processes of learning. Ideally, as in hip-hop, sampling and other aesthetics in a second wave should have intended outcomes—even if those intentions are to disrupt and generate.

An important question driving the recent push toward culturally sustain-ing pedagogies is relevant here. Paris and Alim (2014) ask, “For what pur-pose and what outcomes?” (p. 88). Considering the aesthetic forms discussed in this article—sampling, flow, layering, ruptures, percussive disruption, and others—there are great possibilities for this potential second wave. But these innovations should be more than intellectual exercises that take abstract con-cepts and apply them in specific, educational ways. We would be wise to stay tethered to Rose’s (1994) initial projection about hip-hop principles as “a potential blueprint for social resistance and affirmation” (p. 39).

Thinking beyond practice to research, a second wave of hip-hop education research would entail thinking through how material and sonic practices of hip-hop can shape and recreate research with respect to “the urban” (see Irby,




2015). The existing sketches of hiphopography are a requisite starting point here. Hiphopography can be traced to James Spady and his anthropology tril-ogy Nation Conscious Rap: The Hip-Hop Vision (Spady & Eure, 1991), Twisted Tales in the Hip-Hop Streets of Philly (Spady et al., 1995), and Street Conscious Rap (Spady et al., 1999). Although Spady provides few explicit contours regarding the method of hiphopography, Alim (2006) offers the following:

Hiphopography can be described as an approach to the study of Hip Hop culture that combines the methods of ethnography, biography, and social and oral history. Importantly, hiphopography is not traditional ethnography. Hierarchical distinctions between “researcher” and the “researched” are purposefully kept to a minimum, even as they are interrogated . . . The values, aesthetics, thoughts, narratives, and interpretations of the culture creators are our starting points. (p. 969-970)

The hierarchical distinction between epistemologies, theories, approaches, and strategies made by Kamberelis and Dimitriadis (2005) is helpful here to tease out some components of hiphopography and expand upon them. Of particular use is the distinction between theories and approaches (or what is often called methods and conflated with other aspects of conducting research). Alim sets hiphopography at the level of approach. It is a “loosely defined structure for conceiving, designing, and carrying out research” (Kamberelis & Dimitriadis, 2005, p. 17). It draws from (perhaps samples from) other social science research approaches to study hip-hop culture.

A second wave of hip-hop education research could expand beyond this in two ways. The first of these is to consider hiphopography as an approach not only to study hip-hop culture but also to study other things, like urban educa-tion. Research approaches, which I often think of as tools, can be used on a variety of “problems.” We might think about hiphopography as a useful tool to study much more than hip-hop.

Second, it can be useful to think about hiphopography beyond the level of approach and consider aesthetic forms at the level of theory as well. Theories, in the phrasing of Kamberelis and Dimitriadis (2005), “constitute abstract sets of assumptions and assertions used to interpret and sometimes explain psychological, social, cultural, and historical processes and formations” (p. 15). The ordination of theories between epistemologies and approaches means that a particular theory can inform different approaches. That is, theo-ries and approaches are not necessarily bound to one another. There are examples of this in hip-hop education scholarship. Love (2012) and Hill



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(2009) each use an ethnographic approach, but they use different theoretical “assumptions and assertions” to interpret and explain within this approach.

Pushing beyond hiphopography as approach, we might locate the aesthetic forms of hip-hop as theoretical tools that can guide analysis and interpreta-tion in a variety of existing social science approaches such as ethnography, portraiture, life history, and others. Such an approach would position rup-tures, layers, samples, percussive disruption, and the like as heuristics to ana-lyze and understand various aspects of urban education. This is a kind of hiphopography of urban education.

I believe there are tentative examples of this use of hip-hop aesthetics as a guiding theoretical framework. In my research about hip-hop on college cam-puses and among college students, an element of my analysis was looking for these hip-hop aesthetic forms in decidedly non-hip-hop educational settings. It makes sense that a producer would sample to make beats, but some stu-dents who were socialized into hip-hop also thought of sampling as a prag-matic approach to education (Petchauer, 2010). It makes sense that a b-girl would anticipate and be prepared for challenges in a dance cypher, but I found that one student, as one of the only Black women at her mostly White college, mobilized the b-girl as an identity framework to anticipate and be prepared for challenges on campus and in classes (Petchauer, 2012a). These were instances of students harnessing abstract concepts from hip-hop expres-sions and applying them in specific educational settings, sometimes in very concrete ways. A hiphopography of urban education would look for these in schools, students’ lives, and in other domains.

In my reading of Brown (2013) and her work with the Black girl initiative SOLHOT (Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths), a more subtle instance of aesthetic forms shapes theory. Her work pushes us to think about how rup-tures, layers, and the (il)legibility they create can protect initiatives from the threats most likely to dismantle them—whether these threats are cultural gen-trification or losing accreditation. With respect to SCM in the previous sec-tion, this kind of protection meant having a street level, largely indecipherable system of organization and a product that created some participatory barriers along the lines of generation and race. With SOLHOT, this kind of protection becomes evident as Brown discusses Endangered Black Girl, a play derived from SOLHOT. Brown emphasizes,

[Endangered Black Girl] is a performance of insider knowledge, whose sense of humor is predicated on a nuanced understanding of Black girlhood culture . . . Without the participation of Black girls, perhaps EBG is no show at all. Certainly it is not fully legible without Black girls present and accounted for . . . fully embodied by their truths. (p. 31)




By way of Black girl insider knowledge and creative potential, SOLHOT maintains some degree of illegibility in the midst of contemporary models of girl programming that work to control Black girls’ bodies, mold them into White middle-class norms, and “fix” them (Brown, 2013, p. 8). By intention, SOLHOT should be misunderstood at least in part by people who are not most central to its existence. A hiphopography of urban education might direct researchers to understand how initiatives like SOLHOT build in mech-anisms of illegibility to protect them from so many of the pressures of urban school “reform” that dismantle them.

Kirkland’s (2013) ethnography on language and literacy in the lives of six young Black men also comes to mind with regard to ruptures. In some instances, this attention to rupture is explicit. He describes the language passed down to these young men as follows:

This language contained the ruptures hidden in the backs of their throats. It fell into pieces as it left their mouths—multiple and splintered—a pluralistic synergy and synchronicity of the language’s many influences. It was an alloy, a congealed amalgam of the many tongues that shaped and cured the young men into one voice pitched in the characteristic tongue of all others. (Kirkland, 2013, p. 43)

Kirkland uses the word ruptures, but more significant in my reading is that his analysis expects and even plans on the ruptured nature of language in the young men’s lives.

This quality also exists at a broader dimension in Kirkland’s (2013) study. Kirkland does not study how the young men’s educational and literate lives are interrupted by surveillance, the judicial system, poverty, or heartbreak. Indeed, each of these exists in the lives of his participants and is evident in the study, yet Kirkland is able to gently account for how language and literacies abide across these ruptures by planning on and accepting the ruptures in his participants’ lives. This comes across most distinctly in the book’s final para-graphs as Kirkland narrates his visit to Shaun, who is in jail. No analysis of disciplinary push-out, school-to-prison pipelines, other relevant systems, or even Shaun’s decisions propels the text forward. In fact, the course of events that led Shaun to serve a jail sentence occupies only two paragraphs of the text. The book closes with Kirkland (2013) waiting uneasily for visiting hours to begin at the jail: “While waiting, I glimpsed Shaun standing behind a glass wall. He saw me and relieved me with a smile” (p. 149). A tacit, non-pathological understanding that part of Shaun’s life may be interrupted by the judicial system allows Kirkland to remain focused on Shaun and his dignity, agency, and literacy.



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Among these three examples of scholarship, one will notice that the presence of any hip-hop content or an explicit focus on hip-hop is minimal. Although my studies touched on some hip-hop content such as rhymes that students wrote and performed, it still focused on the aesthetics at work in students’ educational lives. One will hear hip-hop and other forms of music in Brown’s (2013) work on SOLHOT, but her analysis moreover reflects a concern for how SOLHOT works, including its ruptures and layers. Kirkland’s (2013) study has even less to do with hip-hop directly. Indeed, some of the young men in his study wrote rhymes and rapped when they were together, but his study is not about hip-hop. There are clues to a deeper expectation for ruptures that creates wider opportunity to center agency and literacy. In different degrees and ways, each of these studies points to ways that hip-hop aesthetic forms can push urban education research at the level of theory.

Conclusion

My approach to this piece has been to trace a developing thread of hip-hop education research and practice to sources outside of education so that it might better inform education. Working along this thread of aesthetic forms, scholars might produce a discernable second wave of hip-hop edu-cation research and practice. At the broadest sense, this endeavor entails drilling down into the abstract concepts of hip-hop that manifest in spe-cific visual, sonic, linguistic, and kinesthetic ways, and applying them in equally specific ways to education. Although this may seem like an unusual endeavor, I believe that principally, this is precisely what social and natu-ral science research has done in some of its most long-standing method-ological frontiers. Linear regression is one of these. Linear is a spatial concept. Linearity is a spatial quality. These work as abstract heuristics in regression to represent a kind of relationship between at least two vari-ables on a Euclidean plane—even though the variables have no physical qualities to them and no relationship in the physical, spatial world. The Euclidean plane (often called an “x–y axis”) is itself a conceptual tool with certain assumption that researchers use to approximate and make meaning. In this same way, samples, layers, flows, ruptures, percussiveness, and hip-hop aesthetic forms might help us to learn and do much more with hip-hop education and research.

Acknowledgment

A big thanks to Eric Hoang for sketching the piece in Figure 1.




Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-tion of this article.

Notes

1. One controlling and stylistic metaphor is the “drunken style” seen in martial arts films. That is, it is not uncommon for a dancer to have a drunken style of their dance that imitates intoxication as well as other stylistic manifestations (Schloss, 2009). aafdsafd

2. One clear discussion of this quality comes from pioneering dancer Ken Swift in his in-depth interview with the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, which can be found here: http://vimeo.com/hhtf

3. The term graffiti is considered by some within hip-hop to be a term originating in the commercial media or a term of criminalization. Some people prefer the term writing. In this article, I use the term writing (and writers) in most places.

4. An idea that is often used to illustrate this emphasis on individuality is that the hallmark achievement of one’s individual style is if a dancer is identifiable by his or her silhouette alone.

5. One extreme example of this rupture of lines is Rammellzee’s esoteric theories of Gothic Futurism and Ikonoklast Panzerism, portions of which can be found here in a distant crevice of the Internet: http://post.thing.net/node/3086

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Author Biography

Emery Petchauer is assistant professor in the teacher development and educational studies department at Oakland University. His research has examined the cultural dimensions of teaching and learning with implications for higher education, urban education, and teacher development. His most recent work examines teacher licensure exams and their implications on teacher racial diversity and policy.



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