“The Only Truth is Music”: Using Hip Hop in Instruction to Illuminate the Power of Voice through Advocacy
Presentation | Tuesday, May 18, 2021 | 11:00am – 12:30pm
This turbulent year of loss, violence, and social disparities has had a profound effect on our students (and on us), and has dramatically altered higher education going forward. As librarians and instructors, we need to adjust our pre-pandemic teachings to account for this seismic shift. Now, more than ever, it is imperative for us to teach our students the power of their voice, and how to use it to become agents for change and disrupt the normative and hegemonic institutions of oppression. This can sound daunting, though, to 17-22 year olds, so how can we reframe it and embed this objective into our instructional work? By showing them that they are already encountering it in their daily and personal lives. This presentation will discuss how hip hop was used in a first-year research seminar entitled “Hamilton’s New York” (as well as critical race theory) to concurrently teach the history of revolutionary New York and serve as a lens highlighting the power of voice through advocacy. It will then seek to foster discussion about how this framework and methodology can be applied to other instructional information literacy sessions in peri-/post-pandemic learning environments.
Presenter: Heather F. Ball
Heather F. Ball is the Digital Engagement and Student Success Librarian at St. John’s University, as well as an Assistant Professor. She holds an MLS/dual certificate in Preservation and Archives from Queens College, an MLitt (University of Glasgow) and Bachelor’s (NYU) in Medieval Studies, and is currently an Information Science doctoral student at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research interests span qualitative and quantitative data analysis, assessment measures, information literacy instruction, digitization and encoding of historical manuscripts, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and twelfth-century Britain.