Bettina L. Love

What Is Hip-Hop-Based Education Doing in "Nice" Fields Such as Early Childhood and Elementary Education?.

Hip-Hop-Based Education (HHBE) has resulted in many positive educational outcomes, ranging from teaching academic skills to teaching critical reflection at secondary levels. Given what HHBE initiatives have accomplished, it is troubling that there is an absence of attention to these methods in education programs for elementary and early childhood educators. For that reason, I intend to use theories of sociocultural learning to examine how young urban children’s Hip Hop communities of practice influence their early learning and identities. Through personal narratives, this work theorizes young urban children’s Hip Hop identities by utilizing children’s situated learning activities. The goal of the work is to begin a dialogue for the application of HHBE in early childhood and elementary education pre-service teacher programs.

Anti-Black state violence, classroom edition: The spirit murdering of Black children

In October of 2015, a Black girl at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina was thrown out of her desk and across the floor by the schools resource officer, Ben Fields, for refusing ...

Go Underground or in Your Face: Queer Students’ Negotiation of All-Girls Catholic Schools

Single-sex Catholic schools are guided by inclusive messages regarding sexuality, homosexuality, and combating homophobia. However, it appears that these official messages have little effect on the heteronormative climates found in such schools. Using the perspective of queer theory, we investigated the experiences of three queer females who attended all-girls Catholic high schools. All three reported climates that stifled homosexuality and promoted a strict gender binary. In response, our participants engaged in two types of gender performance: “going underground” and “in your face.” The climate in these schools forced our participants to invest substantial energy in creating alternative personas.

Good Kids, Mad Cities Kendrick Lamar and Finding Inner Resistance in Response to FergusonUSA

The author draws from the works of Kevin Quashie and Kendrick Lamar to analyze the ways in which Black bodies in Hip Hop culture can represent resistance while being quiet, still, or building on existential consciousness from their interior. As many youth of color are good kids in mad cities, the article focuses on the question, “What does it mean for a generation of youth who are coming of age under the loud publicness of Hip Hop, racism, state violence, and domestic terrorism to know that resistance also can be found in the act of stillness?”

Complex Personhood of Hip Hop & the Sensibilities of the Culture that Fosters Knowledge of Self & Self-Determination

ABSTRACT Hip hop music and culture have a complex identity in that hip hop is based in self-determination, resistance, and the long enduring fight for Black freedom, but was also created alongside the seductiveness of the material and psychological conditions of capitalism, sexism, and patriarchy. Hip hop pedagogy (HHP) as a pedagogical framework is birthed out of that intricate balance in hip hop. Given those basic contradictions, I explore the complex personhood of hip hop and its relationship to HHP, which generates humanizing, critical, and creative pedagogical (re)interventions and sensibilities that foster self-determination, self-knowledge, and acts of resistance with young people. I do this by examining hip hop educational spaces that nurture the ways of doing and knowing youth who are deeply informed by hip hop.

Critical Community Conversations: Cultivating the Elusive Dialogue About Racism With Parents, Community Members, and Teachers

Abstract This article highlights how two researchers started Critical Community Conversations (CCC) with a school community in an effort to learn from one another and build solidarity. The intent was for CCC to focus on some of the most pressing issues facing our nation, state, and local neighborhoods, with a special lens on racism.

“No there is nothing wrong with your eyes, my letterhead is indeed crooked”: An introduction to the study of Black and Brown lesbian educators

ABSTRACT To date, there is a noticeable lack of studies that focus exclusively on the pedagogical practices, teaching experiences, identity, and gender performances of Black and Brown lesbian educators (BBLE). This special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies aims to make the hyperinvisibility of BBLE visible and proposes to fill this scholarly gap by exploring this topic from a variety of cultural and disciplinary perspectives.

“She has a real connection with them”: Reimagining and expanding our definitions of Black masculinity and mentoring in education through female masculinity

ABSTRACT Through narrative inquiry, utilizing in-depth interviews and field observations, the goal of this research is to begin a dialogue within the field of education and mentoring scholarship that expands the mentoring of Black males beyond traditional norms of sex and gender identities/performances to reimagine the ways in which Black female masculinity can be a site of mentoring for Black and Brown boys.