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Rap has become the most popular genre of music in the United States, and among the most popular globally. However, the stylistic norms and creative ethics of hip-hop are markedly different from the traditions of European art music. Many formally trained educators who might want to incorporate hip-hop’s musical content, aesthetics or creative processes must venture far beyond their comfort zone in order to do so. Meanwhile, hip-hop artists face systematic barriers and disincentives to pursuing music education as a career.

Implicit in questions about whether or how to include hip-hop as content and/or as process in music education are larger questions about the goals of music education. Some music educators consider rap and other popular musics to be either irrelevant or actively harmful to the goals of “elevating” and expanding students’ tastes and building musical sophistication more broadly. However, hip-hop has unexplored potential as a tool not just for teaching popular music creativities, but for teaching historical and canonical musics as well: by treating them as raw material for the creation of new music, using sampling and remixing as methods of critique and transformation. 

In this talk, Ethan will present his dissertation research, a multiple case study of three hip-hop educators in New York City. I examine the ways that they not merely teach rap as a subject area, but rather, how they live hip-hop as a value system. I demonstrate that this value system can be the basis for a liberatory, culturally relevant pedagogy that prepares students to be critical participants in their own musical cultures. And he will show how hip-hop informs his own research methods. In particular, Ethan will showcase the dissertation mixtape, a collection of tracks that use hip-hop’s musical techniques and aesthetics to examine and present his audio data.

An update looking at current and emerging trends that will impact on music education in the near to medium term ... in particular the role of ever-evolving technologies and pedagogical approaches, and how to prepare for the future.

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