Training
The H2ED Center offers professional development training to administrators, educators, teaching artists, and community leaders. The Center also develops courses, seminars and lectures for k-12, undergraduate, and graduate students.
Hip-Hop Social Entrepreneurship: Social Enterprising for the 21st Century
Facilitated by Martha Diaz
The Social Entrepreneurship global movement is redefining the way we engage as citizens, tackle social problems, and develop community. Social entrepreneurs are turning problem solving ideas into responsible enterprises with a blended social and financial value that taps into the government, corporate, and public sectors. From micro-lending and health workshops to book publishing and music production, participants will learn how to incorporate into their curriculum Hip-Hop social entrepreneurship models that will help students develop critical-thinking, problem solving concepts, research and community organizing skills, comparative analysis, strategy, and team building methods. The workshop includes essential tools and materials to create a business plan, marketing and fund raising campaigns, and rubric for assessment. This interdisciplinary critical project-based pedagogical approach can be used across the curriculum.
Fresh, Bold and So Def: Women In Hip-Hop Changing The Game
Facilitated by Martha Diaz
Fresh, Bold, and So Def explores and fosters women's roles and leadership positions within Hip-Hop culture and the community, while examining the negative factors and power struggle that hinder the growth and awareness of these women. In this workshop, participants will get a culturally responsive education history lesson spanning from the early 1970s to present day. Through interactive curriculum-building activities and multimedia tools, educators and students will critically deconstruct images and messages that portray women in Hip-Hop in popular culture. Participants will learn about the innovators that are creating social change in the classroom, community and the entertainment industry.
Hip Hop As Pedagogy and the Hip-Hop Theater Initiative
Facilitated by Dr. Daniel Banks
In this session, participants will discuss their own personal goals and ethos as educators and think about how to model the core values of Hip Hop culture in their pedagogy. We will consider the intelligences and literacies of today's young people "born under the sign of Hip Hop" and begin to think through alternative classroom methodologies that are resonant with these ways of knowing. This workshop includes interactive exercises and a multimedia presentation on the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative's work in Ghana and South Africa, focusing on how HHT is used as a tool for self-empowerment and leadership training among young people.
We The Griot: Storytelling and Performance in the Age of Hip-Hop
Facilitated by Dr. Daniel Banks
In this workshop, participants will go through a progression to understand the dynamics of the African griot, the community storyteller, historian, and archive of communal knowledge. The workshop participants will take the role of the modern-day griot. After a physical warm-up, they will be led on a series of exercises where they develop their own stories, created out of the "cipher," the circle that Hip-Hop artists use for improvisation and rhyming. They will then explore how these stories interrelate and begin to think about "staging" their individual community's voices.
It's Bigger than Hip Hop - Using Arts-Based Projects to Enhance the Academic-Curriculum
Facilitated by Fabian "Farbeon" Saucedo
In this workshop, participants will explore arts-integration methodology, planning-strategies and teaching-techniques to ensure a successful arts-based project designed to meet core academic standards. Whether using visual art to improve student achievement in Math/Science or poetry and performance to improve achievement in English/Social Studies, the arts can be used to increase student engagement by drawing real-world connections and empowering student voices. Participants will walk away with a collaborative planning protocol that will guide an art-integration from inception to completion, as well as several models of assessment that can be used to ensure that academic standards are being met. Participants will develop strategies to effectively communicate project goals and outcomes to principals/school administrators. Participants should be prepared to actively participate--maybe even freestyle!
Watering Our Roots: Re-contextualizing History Through Bob Marley's 'Small Axe'
Facilitated by Kanene Holder
This workshop employs Marley's axiom "If You Are the Big Tree, I am the Small Axe", (BTSA) as a prism and alternative instructional strategy through which to analyze and re-contextualize black resistive social movements throughout history and how they affect Hip-Hop. Due to the phenomena Freire refers to as "banking," students are often passive receptacles of dis-(in)formation becoming disengaged learners. Also these students lack knowledge of self, which can be regained through "conscientization", "dialogue" and "praxis", allowing learners to question their present conditions and systems of isms resulting in dehumanization. Hence BTSA's goals are three-pronged: to first repair these disengaged learners through acknowledgement and inclusion of their voices, perspectives and utilizing their tools of self-formation including Hip-Hop. Secondly, to raise their academic aptitude and attitude towards history. Third BTSA is an empowering pedagogy, allowing learners to see themselves (as small axes) on a continuum and legacy of struggle and resistance. Teachers will be guided through the development and facilitation of a standards-based, multi-disciplinary and project-based history unit utilizing BTSA including rubrics.
'Who's World is This?': Unlocking Curiosity and Autonomous Thought in Disenfranchised Adolescents Through Hip-Hop
Facilitated by Kanene Holder
Teachers explore 'deviant', yet revolutionary, leaders such as Frantz Fanon, Dewey, Du Bois, Tupac and others as a prism through which to analyze Hip-Hop as the liberatory counterculture of the 'hood. We will discuss recurring themes within Hip-Hop to fully comprehend it on a continuum of youth/rebellion (fighting the power) to deconstruct his-tory and the complexities of students lived realities. Our central question, then, is: How can we best relate and reflect culturally relevant best practices in classrooms (under siege)? Strategies to re-purpose students' angst as modes of transformation and self-(re)fashioning will be devised and implemented in simulated-sessions. By engaging Hip-Hop's elements including its lyrics, Critical Hip-Hop Pedagogy, Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Critical Race Theory and the technology that saturates our classrooms, teachers problematize the traditional curriculum in order to empower students as the engine of their own cognition. Are we fully preparing our youth for the information age? In response to this quest, teachers will develop a unit and tenets for their classroom culture/methodology based on a re-imagining of Nas' "One Mic" and "Who's World Is This?".
Social Justice + Hip-Hop: Where the Rubber Meets the Road
Facilitated by Marcella Runell Hall
This session will explore the foundational issues of social justice education, including but not limited to theory and history regarding multiple identities such as: race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion and education. Special attention will be given to race/ethnicity/class in education. We will further explore the tenets of Critical Pedagogy and the intersections between the levels and types of oppression, the cycle of socialization and contemporary Critical Pedagogies. And finally we will explore the history of Hip-Hop education, and how Hip-Hop is integrated into academic contexts. Through multimedia as well as hands on instruction, we will create new knowledge about Hip-Hop and the potential for social change through education. Participants can expect to come out of this session with templates, outlines and/or complete lesson plans created to enthusiastically address the complexities of utilizing Hip-Hop for social justice education. We will watch Race: Power of an Illusion, as well as listen to excerpts from the Hip-Hop Education Guidebook CD. We will also have a complete collection of Hip-Hop Education Resource to draw from.
Revolutionary But Edu-Gangsta - Developing and Implementing a Non-Cliché, Practical, and Democratically Centered Intervention to Critically Reach Middle School Youth
Facilitated by Casey "Phakamani" Wong
Our children are being fed images and ideas that are being shamelessly marketed, while at the same time ignorantly critiqued by conservative pundits, all without considering the consequences of it all on our children invested in the music and culture. In this workshop participants will focus on developing and implementing an engaging democratically centered intervention for middle school students evolved from Malcolm X's message to the youth decades ago: ". . . see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself." Although we will specifically focus on realizing an elective course delving into hip hop music and culture, what you learn will be applicable and helpful for incorporating other youth cultures into your respective classroom, after-school program, or other youth-centered space of intervention as well.
Hip Hop Saved My Life - Strategies on How to Use Hip-Hop to Reach the "Unreachable" Youth
Facilitated by Casey "Phakamani" Wong
If you work within an "urban" school, chances are, no matter how hard you try as an educator, there is going to be "that" student who is struggling to keep up, socially and/or academically. In this workshop you will learn practical strategies and approaches for reaching "that" student intimately connected with Hip-Hop, but not so much in school. You will learn how to figure out exactly what drives them, what are their interests; what you can use as you seek to empower your student, socially and/or academically. Although we will focus on Hip-Hop, this approach can be used with students engaged in diverse interests as martial arts, football, poetry, comics, and fashion.
DECODED: Engaging Hip Hop Lyrics and Themes to Develop Culturally Responsive Curriculum
Facilitated by Adeyemi Stembridge and Chemay Morales
This workshop will provide a model for using Jay-Z's Decoded as a resource for building inter-disciplinary curriculum units that incorporate academic content elements of both the humanities and social sciences. The workshop provides guidance on how to use the text as both (1) a tool for facilitating a richer understanding of low-income, urban communities and also (2) developing unit plans for secondary instruction. The curriculum-building activities will be conceptualized through a Culturally Responsive Education (CRE) and Understanding by Design (UbD) dual lens. The goal for curriculum building will be to utilize Decoded and the music of Jay-Z to develop rich and substantive lessons that center around essential questions that both reflect the lived experiences of and hold resonance for students from marginalized (and particularly urban) communities. The interactive workshop will focus on using the text to unpack a particular theme and demonstrate how interdisciplinary unit plans can be developed through other themes, as well.
Being a "Creative Partner" / The Art Dept.
Facilitated by Aaron "SpazeCraft" Lazansky-Olivas
Communication through the visual arts is one of the most powerful ways to learn, to teach and to reach. The "Art Dept." offers mediums to utilize in the classroom while tapping into subject based curriculum, a variety of DOE standards and creative methods of physical, mental and interactive engagement. This workshop provides core principles to leverage the level of participation and potential of the individual student, the classroom teacher and in conjunction with the Arts Educator. Using a Hip-Hop based model of "Creating something from nothing", participants will discover creative ways to implement eco-friendly and cost effective processes with which to engage their students. Participants will also explore Collective Project Methodology (CPM), which will give them a set of project-based teaching tools and framework to work with. Participants leave with 3 models of interdisciplinary collaborative arts projects that they can apply to their classroom/individualized assessments and standards-based academic goals. A working knowledge of "Hip-Hop" related visual arts and processes to apply in the classroom and a critical eye to research and source "socially & culturally relevant" content for use in their classrooms. The content & pedagogy is modular that can be remixed/adapted for use at most grade levels and in a variety of areas of study.
Remixing the Medium
Facilitated by Aaron "SpazeCraft" Lazansky-Olivas
The objective of this session is to integrate arts and media-literacy techniques within a Hip-Hop framework into the class to ensure success in project-based learning with quantifiable results. This workshop will give participants the tools to instill in their methodologies a hypercritical view into and beyond the Hip-Hop lens in order to successfully connect with and shape their students understandings of the learning process, while giving their students the tools needed to excel at their academic studies. A variety of Hip-Hop arts and media projects will be explored, studied, critiqued, re-contextualized and referenced for future implementation, such as these examples. Participants will be able to identify, apply and use Hip-Hop arts and media as foundations for standards-based projects from a student-centric perspective in the classroom.
Hip Hop Literature: An Exploration of an Emerging Canon
Facilitated by Felicia Pride
This workshop will explore the emerging body of literary work (fiction and creative nonfiction) by hip-hop generation writers—think Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sofía Quintero, Touré and Eisa Ulen—who infuse aesthetics of the culture—from sampling to coding—and pull from a variety of cultural inspiration within and beyond hip-hop, ultimately providing rich teaching opportunities across a number of disciplines. Participants will observe practical applications to engage these texts in educational settings, discuss best practices for teaching this literature and receive a comprehensive bibliography.