ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the impact of Hip-Hop Based Education (HHBE) on youth situated in schools across North America. The insight is gleaned from the pedagogical projects two of the authors namely: Lauren M. Gardner and Debangshu Roychoudhury, implemented as Hip-Hop artists and critical researchers in schools in Houston and New York. It focuses on how youth-led organizations informed by Hip-Hop culture offered youth in Toronto, Houston, and New York a humanizing education amid educational structures predicated on molding youth into "human products" who "lack the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state". It then focuses on two specific coded items: abstract words as a form of expression and support strategies utilized through the use of rhetoric. Abstract words are an important component of Hip-Hop narrative in that people allow the rapper to utilize metaphor and simile as a way to create imagery that is vivid and oftentimes explicit.
