Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #118117

P. Thandi Hicks-Harper, PhD, Youth Popular Culture Institute, Inc., 8906 Fox Park Road, Clinton, MD 20735, 301-877-1525, ypctoday@aol.com, Warren A. Rhodes, PhD, Department of Mental Health, Prevention Research Center, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 624 North Broadway, Baltimore, MD 21205, and Sylvia L. Quinton, Esq, Strategic Community Services, Inc., P. O. Box 1346, Lanham, MD 20703.

Hip-hop is now ‘thirty-something', and it exerts major influence in many aspects of dominant culture: entertainment, advertising, fashion, art, interpersonal and intergenerational relationships, politics, economics, religion – but not education. For most adults, including teachers, hip-hop is synonymous with ‘gangsta rap' music, social alienation, drug use, gang/thug violence, promiscuity, and misogyny. While Hip-hop remains controversial, the current research discusses how Hip-hop can be used as a prevention tool in public schools.

Hip-Hop 2 Prevent Substance Abuse and HIV (H2P) is a SAMHSA/CSAP-funded, community coalition effort to effectively educate urban, middle-school youth to avoid the substance use and sexual behaviors that put youth at risk for HIV/AIDS. H2P incorporates two SAMHSA model prevention programs (BART and Project Success), integrating them into a single curriculum using hip-hop modalities as teaching/communication media. Though not a part of the middle school curriculum, H2P is implemented via a partnering agreement between STEP Network (the community coalition) and a targeted middle school, whereby some H2P sessions convene on school property after school, and H2P instructors are recruited from the middle school's faculty. Faculty attitude and acceptance are critical factors for H2P's success so, before instructor recruitment began, the school's entire faculty and administration were invited to participate in Hip-Hop 101 – a 4-hour in-service workshop designed to increase participant knowledge of hip-hop and to promote a more positive attitude toward hip-hop. This presentation describes the workshop and reports significant changes in faculty attitudes and knowledge as measured by an 18-item pre-post survey of workshop participants and non-participants.

Learning Objectives:

• After this learning experience, most participants will recognize or, at minimum, be forced to reevaluate hip-hop’s potential as a very powerful medium for effective communication of substance use prevention and HIV prevention messages, as well as other pro-social, healthy lifestyle information.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commertial supporters WITH THE EXCEPTION OF the following: I am CEO/President of YPCI and, as a consultant to SCSI (the grantee), I authored the curriculum used in the initiative described..

Recorded presentation