One Time 4 Your Mind: Literate Practice, Critical Analysis, and Construction of Self in Hip-Hop Pedagogy

In this dissertation, I use autoethnographic methods grounded in a critical race analysis of schools and schooling to situate the use of hip hop in my own classroom as a tool for critical literacy development for students who are underserved in schools because of instructional practices and curriculum orientations that fail to recognize or build upon their out-of-school discourses. I reflect on how I use hip hop to help students utilize these out-of-school discourses to not only appropriate the skills and competencies embedded in literary interpretation of canonical texts, but also to extend these interpretations to critically examine the institutional contexts in which they are situated and to contest marginalized identities within the school. This dissertation examines the literature on hip hop in education, critical pedagogy, and Critical Race Theory in education and calls for a hip-hop pedagogy that does not solely serve as a bridge to school sanctioned knowledge, but recognizes the intellectual wealth of hip hop in its own right while actively challenging structural inequalities and seeking to resituate the identities of youth of color with respect to disempowering school spaces and social contexts.