Hip Hop in the Heartland:

7th Annual Educator and Community Leader Training Institute

July 23-27, 2012
Union South, UW-Madison

Register HERE!

Download Brochure HERE!

Download worksheet to learn how to apply on-line and register for UW-Madison Credit for Hip Hop in the Heartland Institute HERE.

Each summer, UW-Madison’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI) teams up with Urban Word, NYC to offer educators and ccommunity leaders a weeklong program to learn the best practices in hip hop and spoken word pedagogy. The Institute brings together the leading educators, professors, emcees and activists utilizing the media of spoken word ad hip hop as relevant, dynamic and necessary educational tools to engage students across multi-disciplinary curricula.

Hip Hop in the Heartland draws from educational theories such as socio-cultural theory, culturally relevant pedagogy, critical race theory, and hip hop and social justice pedagogies, to help educators and community leaders connect hip hop as both an art form and an instructional tool to improve the academic success of students who remain marginalized in our schools.

Participants learn proven, hands-on techniques to devleop lesson plans and strengthen their course study, as well as create a platform from which they will understand the scope of hip hop history, culture and politics. Evening programming consists of an all-star cast who will synthesize the day trainings with effective strategies and cutting-edge multicultural educational approaches.

Hip Hop in the Heartland is specifically designed for:

Classroom teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, school personnel, community educators, college educators, community leaders, education students, hip hop and spoken word educators and practitioners, and anyone committed to social justice and urban education.

Gain a better understanding of the scope of hip hop history, culture, and politics. Deepen your practice as a spoken word and hip hop educator, and engage in best practice approaches to student-centered learning.

• Discover the best practices in hip hop and spoken word pedagogy
• Learn skills to better reach and mentor your students
• Improve academic achievement, reduce behavior issues and energize your classroom
• Get practical strategies for increasing participation and building community
• Earn university credit, CEUs or fulfill your professional development plan goals
• Meet new colleagues and enjoy UW-Madison’s beautiful campus!

Agenda:

Daily sessions follow themes to strengthen participants’ knowledge and provide the tools to engage the 21st-century classroom. Each day wraps up with Write, Reflect and Build sessions where participants interact with the lesson planning process, and build their own curricula that engage literacy, critical thinking and creative writing.

Monday: Building the Cypher: Making Community and Making Poems

8-9 am: Registration (on-site)

9 am:  Spoken Word and Hip Hop Pedagogy: Introductions and Overview with Michael Cirelli

10 am – 3 pm:  From Full Presence to Where I’m From – Writing That Builds Community in the Classroom (Part 1), and If That is Poetry, Then Maybe I Can DO It! with Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz and Taylor Mali

3:30-5:30 pm: Write, Reflect and Build: Dialogue Arts Project with Adam Falkner

7 pm: Opening Night Performance: From Teaching to Performing to Publishing with Taylor Mali and Mahogany Browne

Tuesday: Transformation and Purpose in the 21st-Century Hip Hop Classroom

10 am – 3 pm:  How the Heart Informs Us – The Hip Hop Architect, and From Full Presence to Where I’m From – Writing that Builds Community in the Classroom (Part 2) with Mahogany Browne and Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz

3:30-5:30 pm:  Write, Reflect and Build: Wearing Another’s Skin: Persona and Perspective, and Dialogue Arts Project (Part 2) with Quraysh Ali Lansana and Adam Falkner

7 pm:  Dr. Christopher Emdin (Columbia University) will speak on STEM: Hip Hop and Urban Science Education

Wednesday: Culture, Critical Literacy and ILL-Literacy

10 am – 3 pm:  STEM With No Root, Bears No Fruit: Hip Hop and Urban Science Education and These Schools CAN Teach Us! with Christopher Emdin and Sam Seidel

3:30-5:30 pm: Write, Reflect and Build: Verse Journalism: Robust Exploration of News and Events Through Poetry and Dialogue Arts Project (Part 2) with Adam Adam Falkner

7 pm: Summer Institute Open Mic & First Wave Performance

Thursday: Hip Hop and Beyond: Reimagining Language, Literacy, and Social Justice

10 am – 3 pm:  HUG Life and Other Flip-Hop Education Slanguage and Methods to Floss and Theories to Flow: Teaching Social Justice and Critical Thinking Through Hip Hop with Sam Seidel and Dawn-Elissa Fischer (Dr. DEF)

3:30-5:30 pm:  Write, Reflect and Build

Friday:  Unearthing the Narratives and W/Rap Up!

10 am – Noon:  Final Session with Dr. DEF

1-3 pm:  Presentations

3 pm:  Closing Cypher

Workshop Descriptions:

Full Presence to Where I’m From – Writing that Builds Community in the Classroom: In this workshop, participants will practice what it means to write for “full presence” and talk about the ways in which this free writing exercise can build community and open up creativity in their students. Through open-ended or guided “presence” writings, teachers can institute this writing exercise at the beginning and/or closing of each class session and witness how it builds community in a classroom. The Where I’m From Poem – a time-tested writing exercise can be scheduled at the appropriate time during the school year to further build community and encourage students to open up social-emotional windows that often lead to more intense and better writing. Participants will listen to, read, and analyze two Where I’m From Poems (from a male and a female writer) and go through the process of writing their own Where I’m From Poem to share with the workshop community before the end of the Institute. Participants will discuss the positives and potential drawbacks of encouraging emotional sharing in the classroom.

If THAT is poetry, then maybe I can DO it!: Learn great lessons to help get your students thinking and enjoying poetry! “The best thing I can do for poetry,” said Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, “is to change the way poetry is taught in high schools.” Taylor Mali, performance poet and middle school teacher, will go one step further by providing writing and spoken-word exercises designed to acquaint middle school students with both the playfulness and power of language. Bring a pen and paper and a willingness to participate.

Write, Reflect & Build : During the Write, Reflect & Build sessions, institute participants will work to engage their own pedagogy with the goal of creating and developing their own curricula and presentations. The week culminates with participant presentations and resource sharing that we can all take into our classrooms and learning spaces. Facilitators represent a range of diverse expertise and disciplines and will create learning environments that are both hands-on and theoretical, in order to give you not only the tools to take to your classrooms, but also the framework to be accountable and sustainable in your practice.

Dialogue Arts Project: Educators have grown weary of professional development sessions that seem to merely “fill a quota” in addressing critical issues of race and identity in the classroom.  By combining performance, creative writing, interactive exercises and small group dialogue, this workshop reaches beyond those safe, cookie-cutter approaches to teach participants the kind of vibrant self-understanding and cultural awareness that is imperative in our increasingly multicultural society. Finding one’s own voice is a challenge that requires us to examine and unpack our own life experiences and excavate the unique stories that shape who we are.  This workshop – an introduction to the presenter’s larger “Dialogue Arts Project” curriculum – uses creative writing and the arts to promote the exploration of social identity among and between students, artists and educators for the purpose of better understanding how their voices contribute to and fit within the changing educational communities in which they work.  This workshop also seeks to provide each participant with a highly individualized lens through which to consider and contextualize the range of pedagogical approaches that they will explore in other sessions throughout the week.  Participants will be encouraged to build on the dialogue that surfaces through this introductory series of sessions and to carry that mindfulness with them throughout the course of the institute.

How the Heart Informs Us – The Hip Hop Architect: Writing for the hip hop lover in all of us, Mahogany Browne illuminates techniques for engaging students in hip hop poetics, critical literacy and identity. Exploring the architecture of hip hop’s vast landscape, various new and dynamic elements of writing, and the intersection of the raw and beating heart, participants can develop relevant and impactful writing opportunities for themselves and their students. This workshop will generate poems that encourage social awareness and cultural exchange. Patricia Smith, Geoff Kagan Trenchard, Lemon Andersen & Asha Bandele are a few of the authors/performers whose work will be studied and discussed.

Wearing Another’s Skin: Persona and Perspective: Based on pedagogy from Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2011), Quraysh Ali Lansana will focus on persona poetry as a teaching tool for all core content areas. Persona poetry has experienced a bit of a renaissance in the past ten years. Many of the recent books published in this genre incorporate history or historic figures, in addition to searing investigations of pop culture in voice. Why have so many poets rediscovered persona, and what elements are necessary to create successful poems in this genre? These questions will be examined via the writings of Marilyn Nelson, Tim Seibles and others. Participants will also craft their own persona poems.

These Schools CAN Teach Us!: What does it look like to design an entire school so that it embraces hip-hop culture?  Beyond studying Tupac lyrics in place of Shakespearian sonnets, how might a hip-hop language arts class look different from a traditional English class?  The prevalent models of schools in this country are outdated and are failing far too many students.  Hip-hop holds solutions not just for how to improve the content of schools, but their actual structures.  This workshop will offer attendees a chance to think outside the box of traditional school and youth program models to imagine institutions that not only engage hip-hop’s elements, but embrace and address students’ culture, creative brilliance, and needs.  After multimedia presentations about some amazing and innovative hip-hop schools and youth programs that already exist, we’ll generate new ideas for how to flip and remix existing educational structures and practices to create more relevant, responsive, and resilient institutions.

HUG LIFE and Other Flip-Hop Education Slanguage: The words we use to describe our work are important.  In this workshop Sam will introduce the concept of–and story behind–HUG LIFE, the name he and his colleagues at AS220 Broad Street Studio (an arts-based youth program created to help students successfully transition out of the prison system) gave to their approach to working with young people.  We will look critically at the language we use with students, fellow educators, and others.  And we will play with words and concepts from hip-hop culture (and beyond), and explore how using them in new ways might influence our work.

Methods to Floss and Theories to Flow: Teaching Social Justice and Critical Thinking through Hip Hop: How does identity influence the way we learn, teach and participate in society? What are some of the relationships among popular culture, such as Hip Hop, to policy and the research that informs it? This workshop engages educators in an examination of identity in its relationship to popular culture, policy and pedagogy. Key concepts concerning Hip Hop aesthetics, activism and research are introduced as tools for inspiring humanistic principles with the youth we teach.

Hip Hop in the Heartland Faculty:

Mahogany L. Browne is a Cave Canem Fellow and the author of several books including Swag & Dear Twitter: Love Letters Hashed Out On-line, recommended by Small Press Distribution & listed on About.com’s “Best Poetry Books of 2010.” She has released five LPs including the live album Sheroshima. As co-founder of the Off Broadway poetry production, Jam On It, and co-producer of NYC’s 1^st Performance Poetry Festival: SoundBites Poetry Festival, Mahogany bridges the gap between lyrical poets and literary emcee. Browne has toured Germany, Amsterdam, England, Canada and recently Australia as 1/3 of the cultural arts exchange project Global Poetics. Her journalism work has been published in magazines Uptown, KING, XXL, The Source, Canada’s The Word and UK’s MOBO. She is an Urban Word NYC mentor, as seen on HBO’s Brave New Voices and is currently the Poet in Residence at the Academy for Young Writers in Brooklyn. She is the publisher of Penmanship Books, a small press for performance artists and owns PoetCD.Com, an on-line marketing and distribution company for poets. Mahogany is currently host and curator of the Friday Night Slam at the famous Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Michael Cirelli is the Executive Director of Urban Word NYC a grassroots not-for-profit organization that provides free, safe, uncensored and ongoing writing, performance and college prep opportunities for NYC teens. He is also the director of the Annual Spoken Word & Hip-Hop Teacher & Community Leader Training Institute at the University of Wisconsin (Hip Hop in the Heartland), and the annual Preemptive Education conference at NYU. He is the author of the award-winning teaching guide, Hip-Hop Poetry & the Classics (Milk Mug, 2004), and most recently, The Poetry Jam (Recorded Books, 2010). His debut poetry collection, Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard (Hanging Loose, 2008) was a NY Times Book Review independent press best seller, and his second collection, Vacations on the Black Star Line (Hanging Loose, 2010) was a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist and was named in About.com’s “Poetry Picks – Best Books of 2010.” He teaches courses on hip-hop poetics and English Education at New York University and Bank Street College of Education. He was featured on season 5 of HBO’s Def Poetry, and both seasons of HBO’s Brave New Voices.

Christopher Emdin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Science and Technology at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he also serves as Director of Secondary School Initiatives at the Urban Science Education Center. He is author of the book, Urban Science Education for the Hip-Hop Generation, and also a columnist for the Huffington Post, where he writes the “Emdin 5″ series. Dr. Emdin holds a Ph.D. in Urban Education with a concentration in Mathematics, Science and Technology, Masters degrees in both Natural Sciences, and Education Administration, and Bachelors degrees in Physical Anthropology, Biology, and Chemistry. Dr. Emdin has coauthored proposals to start New York City Public Schools, taught middle school mathematics and general science, and high school physics, and chemistry. He has also been a researcher on many NSF funded research projects in mathematics and science education.

Dr. Emdin was recently awarded the “Best paper for Innovation in Teaching” by the The Association for Science Teacher Education (ASTE) and was named  ”Groundbreaking Educator” by Arrive Magazine. He was also awarded the Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) Outstanding Dissertation and Emerging Leader Awards. His research focuses on issues of race, class, and diversity in urban science classrooms, the use of new theoretical frameworks to transform education, and urban school reform.  Dr. Emdin researches, consults, and delivers speeches on various issues in schools such as science technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, urban education, school and classroom climate, fostering dialogue in schools, and student engagement. He is a noted public speaker on issues such as the Obama Effect on Urban Education, Hip-hop culture and education, improving STEM education, and various educational and socio-political issues related to urban youth of color.

Adam Falkner is a poet, performer, high school English teacher and the Founder and Executive Director of the Dialogue Arts Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to incorporating creative writing, the performing arts, and inter-group dialogue into the teaching and training processes. His work has appeared in numerous publications including decomP Magazine, The Other Journal and The Literary Bohemian, among others, and has been featured in curricula for use at several prominent institutions of higher education including Columbia University, the University of Michigan and the University of Washington.  He regularly teaches and performs at colleges and universities across the country and has appeared on HBO, BET, Michigan and New York Public Radio and in Time Out New York. A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Mr. Falkner is a National Associate for the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), Ginsberg scholar and recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Spirit Award in higher education. He currently teaches 10th grade Creative Writing at the Academy for Young Writers in Brooklyn, New York. www.adamfalknerarts.com

Dawn-Elissa Fischer (a.k.a. the “D.E.F.” Professor) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University, where she teaches courses on black popular culture, digital research design and visual ethnography. Fischer has worked on a number of different community-based campaigns using Hip Hop to address issues of voter disenfranchisement, gender based violence, literacy and the digital divide. Fischer is a co-founder of the National Hip Hop Political Convention, a Hip Hop civic engagement project. She is a founding staff member of the Hip Hop Archive at Harvard University, and she co-produced the Hip Hop Archive’s first film, “Nihon Style” with filmmaker Bianca White. Dr. Fischer currently serves as the Hip Hop Archive’s Associate Director of Research and Development, and she is working with talented community educators, artists and pioneer scholars developing the Hip Hop University Project.

Gloria Ladson-Billings is the Hip Hop in the Heartland faculty of record.  She is the Kellner Family Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the 2005-2006 president of the American Educational Research Association. Her research examines the pedagogical practices of teachers who are successful with African American students. Her work has won numerous scholarly awards, including the H.I. Romnes faculty fellowship, the Spencer Post-doctoral Fellowship, and the Palmer O. Johnson Outstanding research award. In 2002, Ladson-Billings was awarded an honorary doctorate from Umea University in Umea, Sweden and in 2003-2004 was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is also the 2004 recipient of the George and Louise Spindler Award for ongoing contributions in educational anthropology, given by the Council on Anthropology & Education of the American Anthropological Association.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems (Third World Press, 2004) and the poetry collection Southside Rain (Third World Press, 2000); The Big World, a children’s book, (Addison-Wesley, 1999); and three poetry chapbooks, bloodsoil (sooner red) (Center for the American Land, May 2009), Greatest Hits: 1995-2005 (Pudding House Publications, 2006) and cockroach children: corner poems and street psalms (nappyhead press, 1995). He is the editor of Glencoe/McGraw-Hill’s African American Literature Reader (Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2001), and I Represent and dream in yourself, which are two anthologies of literary works from Chicago’s award-winning youth arts employment program, Gallery 37 (Tia Chucha Press, 1996 and 1997, respectively). He is also co-editor of Dream of A Word: The Tia Chucha Press Poetry Anthology (Tia Chucha Press, 2006), and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (Third World Press, 2002). His most recent book is Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community w/Georgia A. Popoff, (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, March 2011). He is Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at Chicago State University, where he served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing from 2002-2011. He is a former faculty member of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School and earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree at the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where he was a Departmental Fellow.

Taylor Mali is one of the most well-known poets to have emerged from the poetry slam movement and one of the original poets to appear on the HBO series “Def Poetry Jam.” His new book, “What Teachers Make,” is called “the right book at the right time . . . a book to be treasured and shared by every teacher in America—and everyone who’s ever loved or learned from one.” He is also the author of two collections of poetry, and is the founding curator of the influential Page Meets Stage reading series at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City.  Mali is a vocal advocate of teachers and the nobility of teaching, having himself spent nine years in the classroom teaching everything from English and history to math and S.A.T. test preparation. He has performed and lectured for teachers all over the world, and his New Teacher Project has a goal of creating 1,000 new teachers through “poetry, persuasion, and perseverance.”

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests include racial literacy development in urban teacher education, critical English Education with Black and Latino male high school students, culturally responsive pedagogy, and the narratives of African American college reentry women. Her work has appeared in several refereed journals including Journal of Curriculum & Pedagogy, Urban Review, English Quarterly, Journal of Negro Education, and Adult Education Quarterly. She is co-editor (with Dr. Chance W. Lewis), of the recent special issue on teacher preparation and the Black community published by Journal of Negro Education. At Teachers College, she is founder and faculty sponsor of the Racial Literacy Roundtables Series where doctoral and Master’s students, and scholars in the field of education facilitate informal conversations around issues of race and diversity for the Teachers College community.

Sam Seidel is an education writer and consultant.  His work focuses on developing and spreading innovative solutions for problems faced by schools, prisons, and community organizations.  As an author, Sam writes for the Husslington Post, GOOD, and national education journals, and has contributed to several anthologies.  His book, Hip Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education, explores existing and potential intersections between hip-hop and education.  As a consultant, Sam has worked for several national education organizations, including the Black Alliance for Educational Options, Big Picture Learning, Diploma Plus, Jobs for the Future, and the National Center on Time and Learning, as well as a spectrum of other clients on a diverse set of projects, ranging from redesigning a statewide juvenile justice system to working with the Rockefeller family to repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws.  Sam served as the Director of Annual Reviews and Partnerships for the Alternative High School Initiative, a national network of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded school development organizations, such as EdVisions and YouthBuild USA.  Trained and certified as a high school Language Arts teacher, Sam has taught in a variety of settings—from first grade at a public elementary school to post-secondary courses in a state prison.  Sam directed AS220 Broad Street Studio, a grassroots arts program for young people in and transitioning out of incarceration and was the founding director of the Maysles Institute’s youth documentary film program.  Sam currently serves on the boards of three organizations: AS220, a non-profit arts organization in Providence, RI; Operation Reach, a non-profit youth development organization in New Orleans, LA; and Resource Generation, a national non-profit that works with wealthy young people committed to social change.  Sam holds a degree in Education History and Policy from Brown University. To learn more, visit: www.hiphopgenius.org, www.husslingtonpost.com, and follow Sam on Twitter: www.twitter.com/husslington

For information on Registration, Fees, Lodging, and Professional Recognition, including, University Credit, Professional Development, and Continuing Education Credits, Click HERE.

Dianna is a mixed media artist from the city of Chicago. She began writing at a very young age, completing her first novel at 12. Since she has been performing since she was 3, when she found poetry slam in high school, her talents soon landed her at the teen national poetry slam 3 out of the 4 years of her high school career –the last by beating over 400 other poets to be on the all star team. She then went on to participate in firstwave where her talents would be further cultivated. She plans to take her knack for visual media into the film world to create social change.

“Harnessing Hip Hop to Teach Students”

Check out the article, University of Wisconsin Brings Hip Hop from The Street to The Classroom, HERE.

Friday, December 2nd 3:30-4:30 pm, H’Doubler Theatre, Lathrop Hall

Come see what the 5th Cohort of First Wave has been cooking up over the semester. I don’t know if you’ve seen them yet, but this is one ridiculously talented group of young artists. As part of the 10th anniversary of the FIG program, they will present an hours worth of work that will then go back into the shop and premiere in full during Line Breaks 2012 in March. Hope you see you there! It will be good for your soul. Check us out on facebook.

Lynda Barry is featured in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine article Lynda Will Make You Believe in Yourself. She was also amazing at The Encyclopedia Road Show at the WI Book Festival.

Check out Mayda Del Valle’s website and posts from Passing the Mic!

Danez Smith is a poet, performer, and playwright from St. Paul, MN. Danez, A Cave Canem fellow published or is forthcoming in ESU Review, Illumination, and Orange Quarterly, is a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a founding member of the First Wave Hip-Hop Theatre Ensemble. A Slam Champion, Danez has established himself as a performer, writer, teacher, and personality in his many worlds. He has received critical acclaim across the country and the globe to Mexico, Panama, Switzerland, and England to perform poetry and theatre. A young artist walking and writing in the footsteps of Balwin and  Hughes, Danez seeks to continue to be a voice for hushed choir boys, the walking shadows, the joy, hurt, and journey of the black queer men.

For OMAI, Danez is a direct line to the students of First Wave, as well as a Senior Student, Mentor, Event Planner/Coordinator, and a jack of all trades in the office.

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