Youth Culture Power E-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 on Hip-Hop Based Education (HHBE). They argue that Hip-Hop culture could be helpful in building relationships and 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 on 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 that 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 youth culture within the classroom.