When I was 20 years old, i started teaching at a juvenile prison.
While there were many things that separated us,
I quickly discovered my students and I had one big thing in common:
our love of hip hop.
For the next few years, rap music became the main content for the classes I taught,
and I saw disengaged students emerge as leaders and experts.
Through engaging elements of hiphop culture together,
students and I learned language arts, life skills,
and to love each other and ourselves more.
As I continued to observed the ways in which our education system is rigged
against black and latino students and students from low income communities,
I asked myself what else we as educators could learn from hiphop,
the insanely innovative and influential global phenomenon
that has emerged from these very same communities.
When I say hiphop, I'm not just talking about music
or music xxx dance, which are considered central elements.
I'm referring to the blend of instincts, confidence, and ingenuity
that develops in oppressed communities
as has been demonstrated through the evolution of hiphop culture.
I'm talking about the Jamaican teenager in the South Bronx
taking two records of the same song
and fading back and forth between them
to create a new musical composition
by playing the most danceable segment over and over.
I'm talking about the inspiring visual artists
realizing they didn't need galleries to represent them
for their work to be seen, and instead painting on train cars
and instantly having an audience of hundreds of thousands.
I'm talking about a highschool dropout from the projects of mercy
using his entrepeneurial hassle and rap skills
to go from selling drugs, to selling CDs out of the trunk of his car,
to selling products at Macy's.
This is what my colleagues and I call hiphop genius,
creative resourcefulnes in the face of limited resources,
or as it's often said in the hiphop community:
flipping something outta nothing.
How could this audacious approach impact our education system?
For starters, we need to exhibit the brush creativity of hiphop pioneers,
just as hiphop producers sample songs
from other genres creating unique new sounds to please
audience's ears, hiphop educators can borrow from diverse models
and improvise xxx blends of educational practices customised
to meet students needs.
If that sounds to abstract, take a look at the highschool
for recording arts in Minnesota, where they mix project based learning
and competency based assesment with artistic, vocational, and business training
with xxxx and xxx at local colleges, with a heavy dose of student leadership.
We don't have to do the same thing that's been done before or follow one model.
We can sample and mix multiple teaching techniques
and school designs to find the blends that best serve our students.
We also need to adapt the value hiphop places on staying fresh:
a hot beat yesterday ... was a hot beat yesterday.
Whoever sends out to make a hot beat today
has to do something new and different to remain relevant.
The world is changing rapidly around us.
The top ten jobs in 2010 didn't exist six years earlier.
Hiphop's premium on freshness must permeate our schools.
And we need to be resourceful.
In the 1970s, thousands of families chose to replace their
linoleum floors.
In poor neighbourhoods, the old linoleum was left in piles on the street.
Young people, without access to playgrounds or dance classes,
turned their parent's trash into dancefloors
and invented new moves like the windmill and the headspin
to maximize its potential.
Faced with our own resource constraints,
educators need to find new platforms,
what refuges could we be dancing on,
and what are our new moves.
Behind the mike, spray cans, turn tables and when it comes to their educations,
students have brilliant ideas and instincts.
Hiphop genius is not just about teachers using hiphop songs
to get kids to succeed in traditional schools.
It's about changing education to respect and build
from young people's brilliance.
It's about the incredible possibilities that occur
when students are engaged,
not just as consumers, but as creators.
We don't need to twig the content inside existing traditional academic structures.
We need to think outside the classroom and build
the institutions that are fundamentally more responsive
to young people's interest and ingenuity.
We need to create schools and school systems
that not only teach hiphop, they are hiphop.