Hip Hop Pedagogy in Music Education: Bridging Cultural Divides Through Collaborative Teaching and Authentic Practice

I (Adam) am a music education faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign where I teach primarily music education students in areas of popular music and music technology. As a White, middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual male currently living without a disability, I attempt—though often fail spectacularly—to acknowledge and account for the incredible unearned privileges that accompany my employment status and identities. I have been teaching, conducting research, facilitating community partnerships, and engaging as a musician with Hip Hop for about a decade, but I come to this work as a cultural outsider.

I grew up in an eclectic musical household, but Hip Hop was not a major influence for me growing up. In the 11 years I spent as a music education undergraduate and K-12 music teacher, Hip Hop was one of many musics I explored casually, but I did not begin to engage the culture seriously until life as a doctoral student and assistant professor in music education.

Navigating into Hip Hop musicianship and scholarship has been eased by at least two factors: 1) I have the advantage of tremendous identity-related privilege in which I am often given the benefit of the doubt in terms of knowledge, experience, intent, access, and anything else that might create tension as I negotiate my space in the world. 2) Almost without exception, the artists, activists, educators, and scholars I have encountered in my personal and professional life who come from Hip Hop culture have been unrelentingly welcoming, curious, generous, patient and forgiving. Lamont Holden is a prime example as one of these most important and influential individuals in my life.

I (Lamont) am a School of Music faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a professional music producer known as TheLetterLBeats. As a Black man, I feel I’ve lived a double life in that I’ve had to separate my love of rap, Black culture, and Hip Hop from all of my professional pursuits because they almost always required crossing over into White culture. This includes the field of education, where I excelled at reaching students and creating strong relationships with them because of my internalization of the culture, yet struggled to connect with my mostly White colleagues.

I started making beats about four years before I finished my M.A. in education. After getting a literacy specialization certification, I started teaching myself how to make beats like I taught my students how to read. It made me a better producer but it also made me a better teacher of producing. During this journey I met Dr. Adam Kruse and participated in some of his classes. Somewhere along the line we developed the idea of “pedagogizing” Hip Hop music production and showing people how to interact authentically with the culture. I think this chapter is our most comprehensive step in that effort.

The content that follows is drawn largely from our work in classroom and community settings including years as K-12 educators, university instructors, summer camp directors, and workshop leaders. We do not pretend to offer a definitive account for all there is to know about Hip Hop and composition, but we have learned some valuable lessons through our teaching and our own musicianship that we expect might be useful to other music educators. Most of the remaining chapter is co-written, as we have shared writing duties and also because we have worked together long enough and closely enough that it is difficult sometimes for us to determine or remember where one of our ideas ended and the influence of the other begins.

That said, the sections titled, “Inside Perspective” are written by Lamont. These sections are in Lamont’s voice to prioritize a life lived more deeply connected to Hip Hop culture with less institutional musical influence. These are “gems” that Lamont drops and the best thing I (Adam) can do is let them shine.