[Music]
CHRISTOPHER EMDIN: Y'know, I'd like to be able to sit in a space with the Secretary
of Education and say, listen, I know you're well-intentioned, but what you're doing isn't
working.
[Music]
The world of education has not had a revolutionary education since the 1950s in the post-Sputnik
era.
So it hasn't worked and that's why we need something new.
We've tried chaining curriculum, we've tried changing standards, we've tried electing new
presidents.
We've had No Child Left Behind, we've had Race to the Top, Race Around the Block, All
Children Left Behind, I mean we've had all these ridiculous ideas that are well-intentioned
about how to improve education, but the only thing that we have not had a concerted focus
on yet—we haven't focused yet on the culture of young people and I argue that this is the
last straw.
I mean, everything else has not worked, so let's focus on using culture as anchor for
instruction because if this doesn't work, then we're doomed.
Y'know, I'd like to be able to sit in a space with the Secretary of Education and say, listen,
I know you're well-intentioned, but what you're doing isn't working.
If you just teach the teachers about their content and you don't teach them how to understand
the culture of young people and understanding of realities of young people, you're creating
a whole college of teachers who go into classrooms and still are ineffective.
I wanna talk to people who are recruiting teachers from some affluent backgrounds and
Ivy League institutions into urban schools and say if you don't prepare those teachers
to understand the culture of young people and to immerse them in hip hop culture, they're
gonna fail.
I wanna say, look, look at what you've done.
Look at the fact that teachers coming to these schools in urban settings work for a year,
work for a year and a half or two years and then go onto law school.
Why do you think they're unsuccessful?
And then they leave and they tell these horrible—horrific stories about their experiences in urban schools
not because of the brilliance of the young people, not because of the intelligence of
the young people, but because they were unequipped for understanding how to be an effective educator.
Some of the most effective educators have been people of color in classrooms with young
people.
But some of the ineffective educators have been people of color in classrooms with young
people.
Because they have an inherent expectation or belief that they understand the culture.
Do not ever take for granted that you understand the reality of a young person.
I—my favorite hip hop artist are Tribe Call Quest and De La Sol and like, y'know, I grew
up in an era where I have a certain brand of hip hop that I love.
The young people that I deal with everyday and work with they are hip hop culture as
well, but they have artists that they attune themselves to.
If I went into the classroom with my perception or my misperception of what hip hop is or
my nostalgic perspective of what hip hop is, I couldn't be truly a reality pedagog.
That I always have to be teaching, I always have to be learning about the culture of young
people, always have to be learning about how hip hop evolves and transforms, because that's
the beauty of the culture.
That it always evolves, it always revolves, it always—it always recreates and reformulates
itself in this beautiful way, yet still ties in to what makes it what it is.
One thing that I have to mention is our group—our Twitter group—Hip Hop Ed, so every Tuesday
night at 9pm Eastern, I have worked with a bunch of educators, Tim Jones, Amila Cook,
Sam Seidel, amazing hip hop educators to create this space where anybody who's interested
intersections of hip hop and education can converge on Twitter and have a conversation
about hip hop.
The questions can be what is a rap cypher?
Or what is a battle?
Or—or how do I use this Jay Z lyric in my classroom?
To y'know how does science and hip hop really connect?
So every week, we come up with a question, we attack it from multiple angles.
We have people across the globe who are hip hop educators come on Twitter every night
to learn more about the intersection of hip hop and education.
This is a movement.
It's the next phase of the work of education and I'm so excited to be a part of it.
I'm Christopher Emdin and you are watching Epiphany.