NU prof offers consult on cool

Emmett Price, a junior professor at Northeastern University, has a credential that faculty increasingly see as crucial: a working knowledge of hip-hop.

Last week, when Price offered a primer on the musical genre and its influence on students, a dozen seasoned faculty pressed into a conference room, raptly listening to his thoughts on baggy jeans, mixed verb tenses, and other shadings of hip-hop culture that have crept into the classroom and left many a teacher flabbergasted.

''I'm not trying to get people to be hip-hop," he told the gathered faculty. ''I'm not trying to get people to put down their Beatles and pick up 50 Cent. I just want you to realize the influence of hip-hop, and use hip-hop as a bridge to building greater student learning."

Professors from across academia are seeking to educate themselves on the 30-year-old musical style, which has become a touchstone for many youth, a kind of cultural bible of cool that offers a model for how to talk, walk, dress, and think. It has intruded forcefully into classrooms, as students' iPods and other portable contraptions have made it an ubiquitous backdrop to their lives.

Tools designed to make hip-hop accessible to teachers are proving popular. A San Francisco nonprofit, Just Think, reports brisk sales of a guidebook and DVD offering tips on how to incorporate hip-hop into the classroom.

But faculty attempts to meet students at their level challenge the long-held view of a professor as an arbiter of proper conduct who is charged with preparing youth for the decidedly un-hip-hop professional world. So professors are entering students' world gingerly, seeking to understand how to better reach students and still maintain boundaries for acceptable classroom behavior.

Price, 31, a professor of music and African-American studies in his fifth year teaching at Northeastern, argues that instructors need not know the difference between hip-hop artists such as Tupac and Biggie. In fact, professing to know the difference might sound artificial. But, he said, professors should try to meet students on their cultural turf. For example, understand that a baseball cap worn backward is not necessarily a show of disrespect, but could be an aesthetic drawn from hip-hop, he said.

''When a student comes in with a hat on backward, if you say, 'Take that mess off!' you have disrespected the student and then you wonder all semester why you can't win the student over," Price told the professors.

Professors nodded and smiled. The backward hat issue, it seemed, was a universal one. Some said they didn't mind the hats in the classroom. But some were concerned that in not banning them, they might be setting their students up to fail in the real world. Nate Rickles, a Northeastern professor of pharmacy practice, said he was taken aback recently when he watched videos of his students in mock patient counseling sessions. Several wore hats, and others called the mock patients by first names and chewed gum during the sessions. When Rickles confronted the students about the behavior, they told him they were trying to make the patients -- some over 80 years old -- comfortable.

Rickles said he recognized the behavior was purposely informal, a reflection of hip-hip culture. But, he said, he also has an obligation to prepare the students for life after college.

''I want to accept the students as they are, but by the same token I have to worry that the patients won't take them seriously," he said. ''I feel terrible. I have to socialize them to pharmacy practice and yet that means asking them to silence their individuality."

Other professors wondered whether accommodating students' expression was unfairly adapting classroom culture to youth prerogatives.

''There is an incongruity here because the student is setting the agenda," said Murray Forman, a communications professor. ''I am not hearing the reciprocal piece of respect for the academic institution and knowledge. I want to make sure that if I give respect, that I get it back."

Price said the answer lies in rules. He said respect will follow when rules are established with sensitivity -- particularly for conventions that were once universally understood but now, for many students, have been reshaped by hip-hop.

''I have to tell my students that there will be no N-word in the classroom," Price said, noting that students slip the word, found in some hip-hop songs, into class conversation. ''There is a notion that you can't hold someone accountable for something they don't know. A restatement of the rules allows for that."

Katrina Williams-Gooding, a sophomore from Boston majoring in African-American studies and communications, said she does not expect professors to import hip-hop sayings into their lectures.

Yet, she said, she wishes some took an interest -- delving beyond ''gangsta rap" and getting to know the hip-hop that grew out of free expression, the real hip-hop about people speaking out."

''That's what they don't know," she said, ''and don't want to know."