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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

P. Thandi Hicks Harper, PhD, Youth Popular Culture Institute, Inc. (YPCI), 8906 Fox Park Rd., Clinton, MD 20735, 301-877-1525, ypctoday@aol.com, Warren A. Rhodes, PhD, ADIA Research & Evaluation Associates, Inc., 4 Niblick Court, Dover, DE 19904, 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. The program has been operational for 2 years and has involved more than 200 middle school students as participants. This presentation describes the H2P program as well as findings from the program's process and outcome evaluations to date.

Learning Objectives: