YOUTH CULTURE POWER BOOK

The BOOK:

In our schools, Hip-Hop culture is the dominant culture among the students. In Youth Culture Power: A #HipHopEd Guide to Building Student Teacher Relationships and Increasing Student Engagement,  Jason D. Rawls and John Robinson, educators and hip-hop artists with  experience in the classrooms of urban schools, focus their efforts  through Hip-Hop Based Education  (HHBE).  They argue that Hip-Hop  culture could be useful in building  relationships and building student  engagement.  The approach to achieve this is Youth Culture Pedagogy (YCP). In this volume, the  authors lay the groundwork for YCP and how they envision  its use  within the classroom. YCP is based in a foundation of reality  pedagogy  (Emdin, 2014), culturally responsive pedagogy (Ladson-Billings,  1995),  and HHBE (Hill, 2009; Petchauer, 2009). We define it as a pedagogical  approach which uses students own culture to create scenarios to  facilitate learning.

In Youth Culture Power,  the authors put forth their C.A.R.E. Model  of youth pedagogy to help  teachers create a positive learning  environment by building  relationships and lessons around students' own  culture. Instead of  forcing students to give up the things  they frequent, they feel  teachers should discuss them and when  possible, use them in lessons.  The purpose of this book is to present a  fresh take on why educators  should not discount the culture of youth  within the classroom.

The ALBUM:

For listeners, Youth Culture Power by  Jay ARE consists of J Rawls  produced, jazz-infused hip-hop tracks over  which the emcees rhyme  poetic on the state of educating inner city youth  today. Rawls and  Robinson list the many challenges; like  culturally-biased standardized  tests, the whitewashing of history in  textbooks and the cutting of  resources, but counter with a wealth of  solutions; like relating to  students, implementing new techniques in the  classroom and simply being  attentive to the happenings of their lives.  The wordplay within every  verse is weighted with the tenets of Youth Culture Pedagogy (YCP), and   sound bites from educators and scholars with foundational schools of   thought, like Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings, Dr. Jocelyn Wilson, Martha   Diaz and Dr. Christopher Emdin, are laced throughout this musical   journey. The project stays true to their musical craft as well as their   educational message, welcoming longtime fans of their music in  addition  to educators and administrators. 

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