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This chapter challenges the notion that Black males in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are missing from the discipline and proposes a model that presents underrepresentation as a function of Black males being both intentionally undiscovered and/or deliberately disconnected from particular academic disciplines. Our work offers a tangible and implementable yet aligned theory/method/exemplar for supporting the STEM genius of Black males through a hip-hop development (HHD) approach that aligns with a unique pedagogical method rooted in hip-hop culture.

In this chapter, we describe a hip-hop based science program as an intervention that combats STEM undiscovery and disconnectedness. We suggest that this program (through its theoretical and methodological roots) provides a set of practices that have the potential to bolster both academic content knowledge and knowledge of self. We argue that this program supports the development of the students' full socioemotional selves – which is a necessary prerequisite to pursuing academic content knowledge.

The proliferation of zero-tolerance behavioral policies and the presence of school resource officers (SROs) are receiving justifiable scrutiny for the deleterious effects they have on students’ functioning. While many have argued the convergence of these policies thwart the development of Black and Latino boys, critiques examining the experiences of Black girls are scant. Disaggregated disciplinary data from across the country reveal “… black girls are suspended at higher rates (12%) than girls of any other race or ethnicity and most boys …” (U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2014, p. 1) suggesting that when it comes to schooling, Black girls are, indeed, “pushed out, overpoliced and underprotected” (Crenshaw, Ocen, & Nanda, 2015, p. 1). The authors of this chapter argue that youth advocates can use hip-hop culture, a tradition rich with resistant prose, to develop critical consciousness and engage Black girls in discussion about socially contrived binaries that reinforce the STPP. The authors demonstrate how the anti-oppressive lyrics of women emcees (e.g., Rapsody, Sa-Roc) can foster therapeutic alliances and dialogues with young Black girls, and how these lyrics might serve to inspire Black girls in composing their own counterhegemonic autobiographical narratives to resist the school-to-prison pipeline.

This chapter discusses how young Black people produce social agency through the sphere of culture, based on hip-hop. Divided into two parts, it surveys theses and dissertations produced in Brazilian universities on the subject in the last ten years. In a second moment, it proposes a research methodology that takes young people as narrators of their social experiences, emphasizing how they think about the school space. The work is an exploratory study and seeks the interposition between formal schooling and the cultural practices of hip-hoppers. It intends to affirm hip-hop as a power, an affirmative form of an ethic of life, a way of life, and a way of escaping the established places for poor, Black young people from the suburbs. It is also intended to show how hip-hop, a marginal culture, has triggered a game of cultural positions within the school and displaced provisions of power.

This paper builds upon a new era of research seeking to understand variability in how desirable outcomes result from engaging rap music as a health enhancing artifact. More specifically, the study explores the music mediated pathways to individual and community well-being. The study emphasizes female music engagement. Quantitative methods are used to examine listening habits and preferences associated with empowering rap music engagement among a female sample of 202 university students using an a priori established path analysis model. Results echo prior research that suggests the functional value of music in helping to define the self independently and articulate one’s social identity within the context of community (Dixon, Zhang, & Conrad, 2009; Hill, 2009; Travis & Bowman, 2012). Specifically, results suggest that among females in this sample, (a) their appropriation of rap music can be empowering, (b) specific factors play a significant role in determining the difference between females that feel more or less empowered from their interactions with rap music, and (c) female listeners were more likely to appropriate rap music for personal and community growth if it was their favorite music type, if they listened often, and if they tended to listen alone more often than with friends. These research findings offer promising routes for more in depth qualitative analysis to help uncover the nuances of preferred engagement strategies and to help define the subjective lived experiences that lead to feeling empowered by music to act toward positive change for oneself and others. Practical results indicate the possibility for gender-specific education, therapeutic or empowerment-based programs that utilize rap music as a rubric.

Feminist perspectives from women of color did not emerge solely as a result from racism in the white feminist movements; such an assumption negates the agency of feminists of color (Roth, 2004). Instead, feminist perspectives by women of color emerged from historical and sociopolitical dynamics within their own communities of origin, as well as in relationship to each other, including in opposition to, and at times in concert with, the white feminist movements. This chapter explores the development, complexities, and unique contributions of Womanist, Black Feminist Thought, hip-hop, Chicana, Native American, global, Asian American, Arab American and ecofeminism. These feminist perspectives include overarching themes, such as the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, ability, age, religion, nationality, and other important identities and issues. Each contemporary feminist theory also explores the interstices of issues such as education, health, economics, reproduction, sociopolitical, historical, organizational, technological, and myriad interrelated dynamics.

The 2019 ‘Sanremo’ Music Festival has stimulated a heated debate on immigration and Italy's so-called liberal pro-immigrant elites, as the winner, Alessandro Mahmoud, a 26-year-old rapper born in Milan, is the son of an Italian mother and an Egyptian immigrant, to whom he ‘dedicated’ his winning song, ‘Soldi’ (Money) that speaks about irresponsible fathers. A rapper with an Arabic name winning Italy's most famous festival has shocked many Italians who were used to seeing in Sanremo a reassuring representation of the old traditional canzone italiana. His victory was unexpected in a country, in which anti-immigrant attitudes are becoming mainstream, and the League's movement is deliberately whipping up this nationalist wind. However, Mahmoud represents only the tip of the iceberg as since 2005 a number of so called ‘second generation rappers’ has been growing in Italy, who are using their lyrics to talk about personal and collective discrimination’ experiences. Through a text analysis of the most prominent second generation rap writers, this chapter aims at detecting the claims for belonging they attach to this musicalized social and political forum, shedding light on the question of Italian citizenship that is still denied to second generation young people.

In this chapter, we explore group counseling interventions for Black males and explain the Achieving Success Everyday (ASE) group model for racial and mathematical development. We use critical race theory (CRT) as a framework to analyze school counseling (SC) and mathematics literature that focuses on Black male students to inform the reconceptualization of the ASE group model for school counselors. We examine the programs and interventions that have been published with Black male participants in school settings within the SC literature. We also examine programs and interventions that have been specially designed to improve Black males' mathematics skills. We specifically focus on gathering findings that provide successful outcomes for Black males in public schools. We examine literature that reflects the role school counselors (SCs) take when supporting Black male students' academic, social, emotional, college, and career identity development. We believe uncovering ideas to capture Black males' experiences in school settings could shed light on how to foster Black excellence. Gaining an understanding of programs and interventions for Black male students through a CRT lens could inform future research, policy, and practice in SC while combating ongoing racism that continues to persist.

The varying traditions, goals, paradigms, and discourses associated with English language arts (ELA) underscore the degree to which there is not one school subject English, but many “Englishes.” In a neoliberal context, where movements like standardization and accountability stake claims about what ELA should be and do in the world, teachers, especially beginning teachers, can struggle to navigate the tensions engendered by these many and contradictory “Englishes.” This chapter attends to this struggle and delineates a process by which English Educators might illustrate the field’s vast and ever-changing terrain and support beginning teachers as they locate themselves in ELA. In delineating this process, we argue that in order to see and navigate the field in a neoliberal era, ELA teachers should treat the field as a discursive construction, constantly re-constructed by the dynamic play of social, political, and economic discourses. We argue that in treating the field as a discursive construction and exploring and locating themselves within the terrain, ELA teachers, rather than feeling powerless in the face of neoliberal forces, can leverage these different discursive forces, and gain footing in their classrooms, schools, and extracurricular communities to navigate the coexistence of many “Englishes” and argue for their pedagogical choices.

This chapter examines the professional background, trajectories, and learning of a broad group of teacher educators involved in initial teacher education. The work specifically identifies those who shape the practice of teaching. The authors who are members of the International Forum on Teacher Educator Development (InFo-TED) were key to the creation of InFo-TED, NA (North America), which has used Zoom technology to launch and spread its efforts. Its central purpose is to spur teacher educators and policymakers to embrace new ways to educate all children.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic certainly exacerbated the teacher shortage in the United States for all racial/ethnic groups, but especially for Black teachers. Black teachers account for 7–8% of the total teacher population and this percentage is the direct result of decades of systemic and structural barriers set against Black teachers in the form of racism. Still, Black teachers who enter the profession do so with the willingness to support all students and uplift Black students who often go years without seeing a teacher that looks like them. Black teachers often face different expectations than their white counterparts and these expectations, without the proper support, lead to Black teachers burning out at higher rates. In an effort to understand Black teachers' and the experiences that contribute them remaining in the classroom, the researchers explored Black teachers' working conditions through a phenomenological approach. The findings of this study suggest that Black teachers deserve working conditions that nurture who they are culturally and professionally, that reject actions of oppression toward them – both implicitly and explicitly, and offer spaces for Black teachers to be authentically heard.