Hours later I continue immersed in the kind of atmosphere emanated from Bettina Love’s presentation at Hip Hop Archives at Hutchins Center, Harvard University. She is a fellow of the W. E. Dubois Institute, is currently teaching at the University of Georgia and her talk was entitled "Get Free: Hip Hop Civics Education”.
The connection between the access to freedom and the concept of “civic education” only reveals the core of the presentation, maybe the central tension around which the ideas flowed, but Love’s talk was largely much than this. Like a rapper herself she walked in front of microphone, waved the body, moved the hands, used the period of breathing and marks of accent to exhibited a sort of rhythm. She offered an academic presentation with flow.
What I’m describing is the way in which some who teach hip-hop showed how to teach, at the same time that she was delivering an academic presentation: she changed the rules and was erudite, funny, authentic and opened to our eyes a new field of questions and possibilities.
Is hard to resume not only the talk, but the different ways envisioned into Love’s research and project, or through the questions made by the attendance. First than anything else, because in the background of the words we should assume the harsh realities of the crisis of education as a world problem. Second, because the crisis should be installed in the territory of American nation and their history. Third, because to speak in the country about lack of attention, violence in the schools, acute necessity of teachers, low budgets and other disgraces, is to speak about black communities: just the locations that nurtured the rebel voice of hip-hop.
In the hands of Love the hip-hop is a tool to discover the past, to recover self-esteem, a tool for the understanding of the present, a door to the self knowledge and for the establish of links between people in their desire of alternatives futures of solidarity, pride, understanding, prosperity and joy.
Hip-hop is an spiritual guide into which is preserved the whole experience of the deprived, it is the most inconceivable depository or archive, full of histories of the past and our current fights also, even containing our dancing practices or our style of walk along the streets, and our form of express happiness when we meet an old friend.
In the work of Love’s the use of hip-hop in the classroom as part of one process who involved a fascinating pedagogical challenge: to apply during the teaching-learning process a group of different elements intimate tied to the practice of hip-hop (for example, the physical ability to produce coordinate movements or the verbal-cognitive to produce improvised lyrics).
Like the majority of all the very good ideas, its basic principle is simple and productive. Is not the same when we see a break-dance competition and we stand surprised, trying to understand how the dancers could develop movements that looks against all laws of Physics? Could we use these movements, energy and joy into the classroom to teach science, for example? If we want to go even further, there is a new and definitive question: Could we teach, in a formal classroom environment, that all this grace and wonders of the body are only possible, and express their final meaning, when we understand it as a moment of transcendence?
This move, from the pure joy to the trascendental, is the assumption of responsibility for our actions and, by the way, our history. That is, in all its different possibilities, what hip-hop proposes. From this angle, speaking of long time deprived communities and offering now a tool to improve teaching and life, Love claimed for an extended reform of society and spoke about the new black intellectuals linked to hip-hop.
We need more projects like this.
V.
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