UCLA

While California community colleges saw the successful implementation of AB 705 in the fall of 2019, equity gaps in first-year composition (FYC) course throughput rates have yet to be closed. Persistent equity gaps in course completion rates continue to leave the most disproportionately impacted groups of students vulnerable to a significant problem: many faculty are underprepared to meet the needs of a growing diverse student body and rely on current-traditional approaches to inform their pedagogy and curriculum. Findings from this study reveal that instructors who integrated Hip Hop based education (HHBE) principles into their pedagogy and curriculum (course assignments, syllabi, teaching/learning activities, and course materials) successfully bridged the gap between students’ community of cultural wealth and the academic concepts to be learned. Moreover, they suggest a need for instructors to expand the circle of human concern (Powell, 2022). Implications from this study’s findings suggest that faculty, department chairs, and administrators should become more student-ready by 1). supporting and offering professional development opportunities that include students' cultural wealth into course curriculum, 2). working ecologically (Bronfenbrenner, 1994) to determine points of intervention in the classroom and 3). building faculty professional development pathways rooted in culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris et al., 2017) that aims to increase student-readiness, welcoming, and belonging among faculty and students.