Cultural Collision and Collusion: Reflections on Hip-Hop Culture, Values, and School Paperback – 12 January 2011

As am educator in a city school, I had high hopes for this text. I wanted it to be a discussion of hip-hop culture as it plays out in schools, how we can tap into that culture to improve engagement in our schools, and examples of schools that have successfully done so. Instead, this book plays out as a series of essays that are dry, repetitive, and not terribly informative. There were some nuggets I found interesting, but I think that these authors were very invested in exposing what is wrong in many schools, rather than offering any concrete methods of improvement. I also think that they failed to take into account that many educators, including myself, have advanced degrees, and are well aware of the political and cultural history that has gotten us to this point, so the rehashing of these elements multiple times throughout the text was unnecessary and frustrating. For the vast majority of educators, the issue isn't understanding our students' histories, or in caring about them as individuals, or in knowing their families; it's in how to move forward; the most that this book has given me is the repetitive statement that educators need to make positive changes in the schools. That's not helpful, and is in fact why I bought the book - because I was hoping for some help in doing just that. No luck.Unfortunately, the book is not particularly well-written, and is poorly edited; there are multiple errors in punctuation, word choice (our vs are), as well as missing words throughout. The essays are continuously written in a repetitive introduction-history of the topic - main topic - main idea restated conclusion format that we encourage our students to avoid, so it's disappointing to see it here. The style, combined with the poor editing, makes the book come off as a collection of undergraduate thesis papers. I expected more from associate professors.I am sorely disappointed, and wish I had spent my time reading something that detailed solutions rather than outlining the problem, and being told essentially 'you all need to fix this' for 159 pages. What is needed is concrete examples and explanations of how successful schools have done it, and of how schools might more successfully work with community groups to make this happen, but alas. The one bright spot is the extensive listing of references, which I plan to mine.