School of hip-hop: urban educators devise innovative hip-hop curricula to help elementary and secondary students succeed academically.

IN 1996, WHEN TIMOTHY JONES EMBARKED UPON a career change and started his first teaching job as a creative writing instructor, he found himself in unchartered territory. "I wasn't well-versed in classic literature at the time," he says. "All I really knew was hip-hop." So the admittedly underprepared instructor grabbed lyrics from Tupac Shakur and used them as springboards for writing activities for his teenage students. "My colleagues thought I was crazy, but the response I received from my students let me know that I was onto something."

More than a decade later, Jones, now director of the Teen Program at Martha's Table, a nonprofit that serves at-risk communities in Washington, D.C., continues to use hip-hop as a literacy and educational tool. He's developed an initiative called "Analyze That," where high-school students analyze themes and lyrics from contemporary hip-hop songs and hypothesize the impact that the songs' messages have on their adolescent development. "My students were really surprised that they could study hip-hop in depth," says Jones, "and in the process they become introduced to a new side of themselves."

Jones isn't the first teacher to bring hip-hop into an educational environment in order to connect with today's youth. To be sure, any number of colleges and universities today are offering courses on hip-hop culture. But studying this material is still not a widespread activity among educators who work with high-school--aged and younger students.

Educators like Marcella Runell are trying to change that. A doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts and adjunct faculty member at Bank Street College of Education, Runell began writing about the fledgling hip-hop education movement when she noticed innovative work from various teachers across the country. She connected with Martha Diaz, a former New York City public-school teacher and president of the Hip-Hop Association, an organization committed to using hip-hop culture as a tool for social change and to serving educators who want to reach youth through the culture. "Martha had a dream about creating a collection of resources that educators could use," says Runell, "adding to the research I already had, I began e-mailing teachers around the country and started an online community of educators to share what they were doing with hip-hop." The result is The Hip-Hop Education Guidebook: Volume 1, a comprehensive collection of lesson plans (that range from mathematics, science, social justice to literacy and English Language Arts) and educational resources for young people in grades 5-12 that have been implemented and used by educators across the country. Hip-Hop Association self-published the book through Lulu.com, and thus far, Runell says that the response to the guidebook has been tremendous because the resource introduces teachers to the diversity of uses for hip-hop in educational settings and validates the work of educators already implementing it.

Unique Fraser, who runs a college preparatory program at a New York City high school, wrote one of the guidebook's literacy lesson plans called "The Story I RIGHT: Hip-Hop & Personal Narrative Writing." The lesson plan grew from her need to prepare her high-school students--many of whom would be the first in their families to attend college--for the college application process, and in particular, to write effective personal statements.

"I wanted to find a way to make them feel that what they had to say and write about themselves was important," Fraser says. On the train one day as she listened to Slick Rick, one of her favorite hip-hop artists from her childhood, she hit upon a way to link the narrative thread in the rapper's songs to the personal storytelling in which she was trying to get her students engaged.

"The Story I RIGHT" introduces students to forms of narrative writing in hip-hop and helps them understand the ways that other narrators tell stories about the world around them. In the lesson, students examine and deconstruct the lyrics to "The Message" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (a notable work from 1982, cited as the first socially conscious hip-hop songs to top the charts). Students are encouraged to think critically about the song's narrative and use their analyses as springboards to write their own personal narratives.

Fraser admits that not all of hip-hop culture is suitable for classroom use, but many of its elements are worth exploring. "Teachers have a responsibility," Fraser says, "to be flexible in how we approach academics, and we need to know who our audience is, just like authors. It doesn't matter if you hate hip-hop. That's irrelevant. If your kids are into it, you have to find a way to [connect]. We need stories that are closer to the context of [these kids'] world."

Gabriel "Asheru" Benn wanted to bring together the best of two worlds that most absorbed him. Benn, a hip-hop artist who's toured nationally and performed the opening song for Aaron McGruder's television series The Boondocks, is also director of Arts in Education at a D.C.-based special education school. He and Rick Henning launched Educational Lyrics, an organization that publishes H.E.L.P. (Hip-Hop Educational Literacy Program), a monthly periodical and reading supplement series designed by teachers and curriculum writers to combine hip-hop music with literacy instruction.

"Literacy is an intervention to high-school dropout rates, teen pregnancy and other social ills," says Benn, who began his career as a middle-school teacher in 1997 and later earned a master's degree in education from National-Louis University, in Chicago. "Fifty percent of the problems plaguing our children can be attributed to the fact that they can't read." In the school where he works, Benn has witnessed firsthand how the embarrassment of illiteracy can affect a young person's self-esteem.

The H.E.L.P. periodicals follow a Weekly Reader format and feature hip-hop artists on the covers. They also adhere to National Reading Standards, and after first being piloted at Rock Creek Academy (where Benn taught and which Henning founded), are now used in other schools and educational settings. The H.E.L.P. program targets deficient readers between the ages of 10 through 18, and moves from beginner to advanced reading levels. Teaching guides that accompany the periodicals are designed for anyone without any prior hip-hop knowledge to use them as an introduction to the culture.

Thus far, H.E.L.P. has developed booklets based on hip-hop songs such as Commons "The Corner," Mos Def's "New World Water," Ghostface's "All That I Got Is You," Kanye West's "Diamonds From Sierra Leone" Nas' "Bridging the Gap," and a little-known song by 50 Cent called "God Gave Me Style." While teachers complained about highlighting a controversial rapper like 50 Cent--and Benn understood why--he was more interested to see how students responded. So far it remains one of the more popular and effective issues in the series.

But Benn aims to highlight artists who record thought-provoking, quality material. He believes that 80 percent of mainstream hip-hop music is derogatory, and like other educators, he finds it difficult to find songs with content appropriate for classroom settings. Songs for the H.E.L.P. booklets are selected based on three requirements: they have socially redeeming or otherwise significant themes addressed in the song's lyrical content; rich vocabulary usage; and are performed by popular artists. H.E.L.P. looks to collaborate with record labels to create booklets based on their artists. The organization has forged a partnership with Atlantic Records to produce a literacy workbook for emerging rapper Saigon and tie it into the artist's youth foundation. Relevance is what Dr. Mahalia Hines, a retired Chicago educator with more than 30 years of experience, and mother of hip-hop artist Common (see "In the Beginning Was the Word," pg. 20), thought about when she urged her son to write a few children's books. "The biggest problem that I noticed in trying to get our children to read is that there weren't many books of interest to them," says Dr. Hines who served as a principal since 1989 in Chicago public schools at the elementary, middle and high school levels.

Wearing the hat of publisher, she developed a self-help series of three books--all written by Common that will be released this June under the company name Hip Hop Schoolhouse. The books, The Mirror in Me, I Like You But I Love Me, and Me Mixed Emotions, are written with a hip-hop flair and deal with issues of self-esteem, the desire to fit in, and also to be happy in one's skin. The series, which is illustrated by artist Lorraine West, is geared towards readers ages 10 and 11, but Dr. Hines says the books can be used for high-school students and kids as young as seven. "I wanted these books to increase critical thinking and comprehension skills," she says, "but it was even more important to me that they deal with loving and caring about yourself."

With the help of her education colleagues, Dr. Hines developed lesson plans and units on how to teach the series, and the back of each book includes a hip-hop dictionary to introduce teachers with unfamiliar vocabulary. "Our children can already think," Dr. Hines says. "But there isn't much to challenge them. We have to come to them where they are, and then we can take them into other directions."

Felicia Pride is the news editor at Black Issues Book Review, and the founder of The Backlist (www.thebacklist.net), a Web site dedicated to African American books and publishing.