Le hip hop à l’école: Practising the ‘fifth element’ as a pedagogical tool in French schools

There has been very little dialogue between hip hop pedagogy research in English-speaking countries and in France so far. Through an analysis of fourteen teachers and hip hop educators, I provide a preliminary exploration of the current status of hip hop education in France. I suggest that even though French hip hop pedagogues are not familiar with critical pedagogy or culturally relevant pedagogy, they do share key questions, themes and practices with their counterparts described in the existing anglophone literature. French artists and teachers participating in this study display a strong sense of how its aesthetics can nourish ‘knowledge of self’ in a way that the founders of the hip hop movement might be inclined to embrace. They also all insist on building a locally anchored community of learners to foster knowledge transmission and underline the decolonial dimension of the hip hop knowledge they teach. These views on how hip hop can and should be used to transmit knowledge contribute to define the critical core of hip hop pedagogy and lead us to consider roadmaps to develop the praxis dimension of hip hop pedagogy that seems to have previously been neglected by French hip hop pedagogues.