Using Hip-Hop samplers to teach critical thinking

Many students that arrive at university studies for the first time can find it tricky to engage with research, critical thinking, analysis, and evaluation. While this is of course, very much dependent on their previous education, there’s evidence that these are skills that students often lack on entering university.

One ability that seems especially underdeveloped and can be a cause for anxiety is the concept of the educated guess and students often struggle to produce an answer if they’re not convinced that it is the “correct” answer. In this article, I’d like to discuss one method that I’m using to help the students feel comfortable making a reasonable guess even though they may not have all the information.

Stealing ideas from Bayesian thinking

Much of this method is inspired by Julia Galef’s ideas around Bayesian thinking, outside of its strict mathematical application. In class, this can, of course, be combined with probability calculations but what I really just want to convey to my students is that they don’t need to know the full answer to a question in order to suggest possible responses and arguments, so I tend to avoid the math aspect. And to be entirely upfront, I’m not really teaching Bayesian thinking; I’m merely using Galef’s model as a starting point to teach students how to adapt and update their conclusion based on new information. The Bayesian concept of priors is undoubtedly applicable in this context but maybe not a vital aspect of learning how to research, so I tend to leave this as a further reading exercise, e.g. a link to one of Julia’s talks.

In short, here’s how I teach this

At this point, it’s just a question of rinse and repeat until we feel that we have a reasonably good idea of the question we’re exploring.

Mitigating students unwillingness to suggest an answer

In addition to this method, and to try and counteract the case that no students want to admit that they don’t know the answer, especially in a room with their peers. I find it useful to give the students a phrase to use when that’s the case, the expression often changes depending on the topic of the module, but the point is that it allows the students to express their bewilderment without having to say — I don’t know. You can use whatever works for you but I tend to use catchwords from pop culture, e.g. Pickle Rick. Most of them know the show and saying that phrase is also funny so it often has the potential to reduce overall insecurities and awkwardness in a classroom.

Using the AKAI MPC to teach critical thinking

There is a range of factors that affect how a student thinks about the concept of critical thinking still I often find a common problem is trying to find examples that are challenging enough so the potential answers are not too evident but not so complicated that the obstacles overshadow the method that I’m trying to teach. For the topic I teach there are a few options, but when I’ve approached these teaching ideas in the past, I’ve found that hip-hop and the sampling equipment associated with this genre is both universal enough to be known by the majority of students and old enough to have lots of detail that are still unknown to students who are current hip-hop fans. In particular, I’ve found that the AKAI MPC sampler and its ubiquitous status within hip-hop production suit my needs perfectly. I’ve listed some reasons for this choice below.

Delivering the method in the classroom

There are different ways of delivering this content in a lesson but I tend to generally break down the below method into smaller chunks of tasks and lecture and I usually describe the initial part of the method before I ask them to do the first task. On the VLE (virtual learning environment) I’ll post a PDF so they’ll have something to refer to before we start the lesson and then in the lesson, we’ll go through the first steps together as a class.

Intended lesson outcome: Use research to identify reasons how the MPC became an integral part of hip-hop production.

Step 1.

Step 2.

At this point, I’ll ask the students to read articles I’ve pre-prepared with some information about the early history of the MPC. This can, of course, be delivered as a flipped classroom, but I find it useful to use this task as an opportunity to talk a bit about research in general.

After the students have done some research via the articles, we can start to build an initial model that can then be expanded on later. As we are focused on the cost and they now know about the numbers I’ll put up the following on the board.

Step 3.

This last step is usually a fantastic opportunity for discussion as the student will inherently know that this can’t be the entire answer to the original question and they’re also curious about how I came up with that figure. While not always the case, I’ve found that often enough that the idea of forming a conclusion based on incomplete data is a strange and unfamiliar concept for the students and they will know more about this method. Actually, even if they’re entirely dismissive of the idea they’ll still want to see how the lesson concludes.

So for the next step, I tend to demonstrate how we can take this further.

Step 4.

This section of the class can easily be expanded on as a more extended in-class activity or self-directed study outside of the lesson by asking the students to create a comparative analysis of available samplers at the time. As I want to see my students include this type of analysis in their final essays I tend to usually return to this concept in a later lesson and instead leave the students with some further reading material on that topic for now. So, for now, this will be a shorter class discussion. Because the ergonomics of the MPC is so ideally suited for beat-making I can be pretty confident that they’ll propose that its layout and design had an impact on its popularity.

Step 5.

Conclusion: This will be a combination of both the above, it will most likely lean towards one way or the either i.e. the answer won’t be 50/50% and the model might be something like this:

This step shows the students how a conclusion can be developed from an initial proposition and demonstrates how the research will give rise to new ideas, and that means the conclusion needs to be adjusted and updated. So as a summary or further reading depending on the remaining time, I’ll demonstrate one more additional step.

Linking our model with analysis and forming some arguments

We have now started to build our module and can see how research contributes to new information and ideas. However, as the students research more they might realise, as an example, that it became known that very influential producers used these machines, so based on this additional information our updated conclusion might look like this:

As our conclusion is becoming a bit more complex we probably need to do an analysis and form some arguments:

• Look and feel will probably remain the same as the initial analysis as if a product is too difficult to work with that is likely to have a strong negative impact on its usability and is likely to trump many of the other factors that contribute to its popularity.
• It’s likely that the new factor of “top producers” increases the emotional aspects of using the equipment and it becomes more desirable due to the allure of fame and success. As these are powerful persuaders for shoppers the cost of the item likely becomes less of a factor when they’re present.

Some thoughts about evidence in this lesson

These arguments will again most likely change depending on the evidence we find that supports them, or not. The facts are just facts so they just need a reference i.e. a source evidencing that Linn invented the MPC at X year etc.

However, for the subjective argument, the students should be made aware that they need to find evidence that the MPC was used by top producers and that this was a known and something that could feasibly become a factor. This probably won’t be a Boolean truth of yes/no but rather a probability based on the evidence that their research finds.

If they find evidence to support their argument (idea) then all is good and they can just continue researching to see what other factors could have affected the popularity of the MPC and continue to adjust the model accordingly. The approach is the same if we don’t find any supporting evidence with the difference that we’re starting over from our 2 initial propositions.