well good evening I'm so delighted to be here in Chicago or as we in Madison like to call it U Madison Southeast because our largest alumni group is right here in this city you know when I come down here for alumni events it's just like being in Madison um I also want to give a special thank you to Dean Dantley uh it really is a special privilege for me to be giving his first wnc lecture now I'm going to tell you if I'm not any good one of the things you can say is well he'll get better right you know um I also want to thank uh all of the support people who literally make this possible you know it's one thing to be here and say look like it's all pulled together but it requires people behind the scenes to make it happen so I want to especially thank uh Jean Pierce Ritter and Sandra Graham for their incredible help with this so can I okay so about 11 years ago as my daughter was entering her senior year of high school our house was inundated with the modern phenomenon known as the col college or university view book given her strong PSAT and SAT scores she was sought out by many high quality institutions on the other hand my sons much older than their sister were not wooed in the same way one was an athlete and so he received his uh School contacts via football coaches and the other was quite fortunate to be able to go to one of the local California state universities however in the case of my daughter every day a new set of glossy cataloges arrived advertising the wonders of the schools we learned the number of Nobel laurates or the booming construction of new Laboratories or the wonderful student teacher ratios that these institutions had just looking at these view books made me want to go back to college she received so many that we had to get a crate and hanging files to keep them straight one day she received the view book from the University of Colorado Boulder and unlike most most of the others this one sat on our kitchen island for many days instead of being perused and then placed alphabetically in the box so after more than two weeks of passing by the Colorado view book on my kitchen island I finally asked my daughter aren't you even going to look at this one it's been sitting in the same place for weeks and at that moment she looked at me and declared oh those people aren't serious ious about education they're just selling mountains now I actually know enough about uh UC Boulder to to know that indeed it is a serious educational institution and that the Colorado view book doesn't fully reflect its Mission and purpose but her statement those people aren't serious about education provides for me an important rubric for thinking about how we might begin to prepare our teachers both at the k12 and Collegiate level for better serving what I want to call New Century students I think we have to prove to students that we are indeed serious about education now I also have to kind of insert here our Loyola experience with my sons the rule was they had to go at least 250 miles away from me I literally took a map and a compass and I said you can't go to any schools inside the circle right and they why not I said cuz I don't want to wash your laundry and I don't want you showing up unexpectedly at my dinner table you going have to think about whether or not you GNA come home but she's the only girl and she is the baby and so dad didn't want her to go too far so lyola was like a really good choice and she had these great uh grades and test scores and um they sent her a wonderful letter and said she was eligible for this great scholarship and they invited her to a orientation meeting so we got in the car and drove down here and I made the classic parent mistake I got all enthusiastic about it oh man I was like oh this is the place you know and it's not that far you know and you know you could get home okay and look and look at the downtown campus girl we can go to Marshall pills we can and uh I played all orientation I even won a lanyard I started to bring that lanyard I mean I was into this thing and I should have just held back because on the road back she said I don't think I want to go there U so to any parents don't express any opinion about any place they want to go just kind of Nod and and and go along with it but I want to talk a little bit about the work I've been doing uh for more than 20 years um I've been investigating teachers who are successful with those students that we tend to think of as miserable failur in our current school system and in general we look at the the data we can agree that African-American students are performing worse than any other group and I came to call this work culturally relevant pedagogy it serves as a theoretical construct for explaining the kind of education that is more likely to ensure the success of most students particularly those students who traditionally have been underserved by our schools notion of culturally relevant pedagogy involves three propositions supporting students learning or what we might call academic achievement developing cultural competence and encouraging sociopolitical Consciousness now I also need to kind of insert in here before I came to Wisconsin I used to teach on the faculty of Santa clar University so I know the tradition it's really interesting to me that sometimes students would object to being pushed around some issues of justice and uh social welfare and I would explain to them have you read the mission of the institution I said because I'm four square with this this Doctrine right here I don't know what the business school is doing but I can tell you that the Jesuits have always made this commitment to social justice so I'm okay so I want to briefly describe what I mean by each of these and how it applies not only to K12 students but also to those we want to cultivate as teachers who we can who can Implement culturally relevant teaching in the classroom so the notion of supporting student learning is the first proposition and in some ways it appears so obvious that it may seem unnecessary to talk about it but I want to make the point that much of what happens in classrooms especially college and university classrooms has little to do with what students learn instead the focus is on what teachers cover many of my colleagues are proud that a certain number of their students do not pass their courses they associate High failure rates with increased rigor in other words I'm tough you know it's going to be hard to pass chemistry 103 right they see their courses and I talked about this with the students earlier as SIDS that allow only a small percentage of the students to get through but a culturally relevant approach sees student learning as the goal for every student so rather than creating a Civ culturally relevant teachers create a net designed to catch up all the students the goal is not coverage it is Mastery it's one of the reasons why these um muks the massive online open classroom are so popular because people can engage with them through and master subject M matter and if you get stuck somewhere you can join another Muk or you can go back and and so in fact I've been actually um recommending them to some of my undergraduates who are struggling with things like organic chemistry I'm like find a moo because you won't be graded in it but you will be have the opportunity to maybe learn um that information and that material in a different way so one of the courses that I offer is entitled cultural development pedagogy and one of the task in that course is to go observe teaching in some place other than the school of education uh my presumption being that people at school of Ed can teach now I realize I'm making a great assumption but I don't say don't go see so and so I just say you can't go to the school of education you go anywhere you want want to and they're encouraged to go to other professional schools they can go to the law school a business school school of Agriculture Life Sciences or they can go to other parts of the university the College of letters and science uh human ecology I even encourage them to look at teaching in non-traditional settings such as a swim class or taiichi or yoga or athletic coaching few years ago one of my students did her observation of teaching in the medical schools kadav lad what she described was an excellent example of a teacher who was focused on Master not coverage the lab was comprised of students in groups of eight and two of the students in each group had been in the lab earlier a day or so before and completed the lab on the renal system their task was to teach the renal system to the other six students the medical professor and a mortician were in the lab observing going from group to group but they were not doing the teaching the two student teachers were detailed and meticulous about their teaching quizzing the students in their group throughout and checking to make sure every student fully understood the renal system the reason the students were so careful with their group members was that the medical Professor would eventually choose two of the students in their group not the ones that they had taught to take the lab exam for the entire group the grade these two students received would be averaged and given to everyone in the group so my student observing this said you should have I mean they were like you really understand this really do it again are you sure and she said I couldn't figure out why these people they were like badgering the students right but they wanted to make sure they fully understood everything because the stakes here were pretty high for them but the reason why that was an interesting and ingenious way to teach uh was that the medical school is looking for maximum competence from its soon to be doctors not coverage from its professors what might it mean for us to develop teachers who demanded this kind of highlevel performance from all students the second component of culturally relevant pedagogy is perhaps the most misunderstood when I use this term I'm referring to one's ability to be firmly grounded in his or her culture of origin and fluent in at least one other culture for most students of color this generally means that they develop a deep understanding and appreciation of their own Heritage History language and Custom while also accessing the mainstream culture white middle class students are not exempt from developing cultural confidence and although schools typically cater directly to their culture they too need to be fluent in at least one other culture in an Ideal World all students would leave school multiculturally competent and able to deal facely with the Cosmopolitan Global World in which they will find themselves at minimum every student should leave school at least by culturally competent but how can we develop culturally competent students if our teachers are culturally incompetent the third component of culturally relevant pedagogy sociopolitical iCal Consciousness is the most ignored teachers understand the need to ensure student learning and some are sympathetic to supporting students cultural confidence however the idea of helping students engage directly in the social and Civic concerns of their schools and communities localities the nation and the world seems beyond the scope of classroom teachers in plain English though I think of this component it as the so what factor our students regularly ask us why they have to learn a particular thing and we regularly respond with because you're going to need this one day but about fourth by about fourth or fifth grade they realize we're lying and those who are Savvy learn or should I say memorize what we teach to pass our tests and to pass our classes those who are less plugged into education resist and they resist in ways that are detrimental to their own academic well-being so a culturally relevant approach to teaching helps students understand that their learning can be and should be connected to the everyday problems of living in a society that is deeply divided along racial ethnic linguistic economic environmental social political and cultural lines and they should be learning that education can and should help alleviate these problems and these divisions that's the whole point of what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he talked about the need for an educated citizenry so I'm going to talk now about the evolution of culturally relevant pedagogy because I stand here now more than 20 plus years past my first inquiries into culturally relevant pedagogy and I find that the notion of culturally relevant pedagogy at least my understanding and practice of it is evolving in some new and exciting ways and those new ways are what I want to focus the remainder of my remarks on how culturally relevant pedagogy can meet the needs of New Century students and their teachers regardless of level that is from elementary through graduate education so first I have a question for you how many of you are on Twitter okay it doesn't surprise me that those are hands of mostly young people that went up if you are that's grade if you're not you are already behind the curve regarding New Century students we are looking at the most technologically astute plugged in globally connected generation the world has ever seen however when I walk into most schools I see signs through out admonishing the students against cell phone use in a school I attended a couple summers ago in Indianapolis I walked into a classroom that had a sign on the door that said no cell phones no cell phones no cell phones and I really wanted to scream the top of my lungs and say it's not a cell phone it's a computer and as I said to the students earlier them old school flip phones that the teachers have and that's a cell phone you know still got the factory ring okay that's my husband all right I won't let him get it I won't let him get a smartphone he got one once I said take it back take it back because number one you gonna break it number two you won't know how to use it so but there there's a totally different understanding in this generation of devices and that's but one example of how New Century students are different from their counterparts of earlier Generations each year bot College in boo Wisconsin conducts what it calls the mindset list for its incoming freshman class the class of 2016 which is a couple years ago had a mindset list that included the following one they have always lived in cyberspace addicted to a new generation of electronic narcotics they don't even know what you're talking about when you say before the internet like what for them is Michael Jackson's family not the Kennedy that constitute American royalty if they miss The Daily Show they can always get their news on YouTube for them Bill Clinton is a senior Statesman of whose presidency they have little knowledge they have never seen an airplane ticket for them women have always piloted warplanes and space shows for them Star Wars has always been just a film not a defense strategy they have come to political Consciousness during a time of increasing doubt about America's future The Twilight Zone involves vampires not rod sirling and they watch television everywhere but on television so I have a new century person living with me uh I don't know how to characterize her um I think the law says she's an adult but basically if you live in my house and I pay all your bills you still adolescent right and she commanders our family room which has the best TV but she never turns the TV on because she's at her device getting all the information she wants to get and I've just shared for you 10 of about 75 items on the mindset list to underscore how rapidly new technologies have widened the generation yet so aging Baby Boomers like me who have always considered themselves hip and cool and with it are struggling to connect with Generation Y students who will eventually teach what I'm calling New Century students now I haven't conducted a scientific study of New Century students but I have made what I think are some testable observations about them as learners and I think we have to consider these Tendencies as we evaluate our teaching they believe in multi that multitasking is an efficient way to work now our psychologist friends have told us it's not but that's not going to stop them from having the computer the handheld being on uh uh Facebook Tumblr Instagram and doing their homework all at the same time they see themselves more as consumers than students and as such they are either purchasing an education or shopping for schools I had an interesting experience with a student because you know of course they are buying this education and she was upset because you know if you're going to buy it the last thing you want to buy is a c all right I'm buying A's and B's I don't know what you're talking about woman and so I was trying to explain to her why she had not warranted what she produced had not warranted an A or a b and in a fit of peak she said to me well I'm paying your salary I said no sweetheart I'm subsidizing your education because you can't actually afford me but this notion that you know I'm shopping I'm buying uh and and quite frankly we as as institutions as administrators we we're feeding into this right I mean that's the viewbook thing you I got to sell this to them they receive their news and information as I said earlier via push notices from their favorite internet sites and blogs and programs like The Daily Show and although they're heavily invested in social justice they are less sanguin about social welfare particularly if they have to bear a CA and it's really interesting to me because you know I'm a child of the 60s where I was just oh we gota got to help the poor we got to help so these are students who on the one hand they'll say they have we need to help the poor but I don't want to pay anything for this so they don't like things like healthcare because it's like you're trying to make me uh buy this stuff and I don't need this and this is just helping these old people and I always have to remind them I said well who paid the bill when you were born somebody's been paying for you up up to now and just trying to get them to understand or they're pushed back against something like Social Security right we just paying for a bunch of old people well when you get old there be somebody paying for you that's how the system works so they're they have a very different um standpoint towards social welfare this one is important for the the faculty and that is for them email is an old technology and they would prefer to communicate via instant messaging and tweets so that's why they don't answer your email because they don't read email they don't answer anybody's email for them Library research can best be done on their desktop which means they rarely leave through an entire Journal now those of us who are the old school Journal people you know you go to the journal and find this article but then you say you'd find something else in the journal say oh this is pretty good too but because they are doing everything electronically they don't have that experience they believe it is important to quote stay connected thus their phones are always at hand and classes that prohibit cell phone use interrupt their connection they have very different conceptions of copyright intellectual property and plagiarism rules and it has to do with the way in which their music is sampled and they making of mixtapes and mashups so I guess what I'm saying is we actually have to go over all this stuff with them not saying that they should be allowed to plagiarize they we need to explain to to them carefully what constitutes plagiarism and I'm offering these observations not to suggest that we have to adapt to their standards but rather to suggest that it is important to know where they are so that we can do a better job of understanding them and assisting them in the classroom and Beyond a decade ago when people referenced the digital divide they were talking solely about the way that social status things like race or class or ethnicity kept some students from accessing electronic information but with the Advent of smartphones tablet Computing and other mobile devices electronic communication has become ubiquitous even in developing nations mobile devices provide access to information and Global Communications in the classrooms the new new digital divide is that which exists between Generations so as I said the teacher on the flip phone is unable to keep up with his or her smartphone using students to maintain for example live Twitter feeds or classroom blogs when our students can access information and knowledge via iTunes U and Open Access online classrooms we have to create more imaginative and engaging spaces in our courses okay so this next point is probably going to be the most controversial thing I say but I'm GNA say it anyway and that is I think that hip hop can be an important cultural vehicle for connecting with New Century students now before I lose the entire audience I want to be clear I'm not suggesting that the over 40 crowd should adopt The Hip Hop aesthetic okay I'm not telling you to go there but rather the Anthropologist in me believes it's important to know as much about a culture with which you work as possible for instance when teaching Puerto Rican students in North Philadelphia I began a deep and rigorous study of Puerto Rican culture and the specifics of the two Puerto Rican communities that made their way to Philadelphia knowing more about those cult cultures helped me plan relevant learning activities it increased my communications with the parents and it boosted Student Success knowing more about those cultures did not make me Puerto Rican similarly when I moved to California I needed to do the same kind of research as I worked with chano and Mexican national students again knowing more about Mexican and Mexican-American culture did did not make me Mexican or Mexican ameran it made me better able to serve the needs of the students who sat before me each day so today's students as I said are in some ways a new breed and I've called them New Century students because of their deep connection to Hip Hop they're something like shape shifters they do not fit neatly into the rigid categories of race class gender or national origin that we've relied upon to make distinctions or to create hierarchy their Sports Heroes include Kobe Bryant and Jeremy Lynn Gabby Douglas and lo Jones they listen to Justin Bieber well maybe ain't nobody listening to Justin no almost Justin is crazy right and Bruno mAh and Nicki Minaj they're more likely to be receptive of students and and people who are gay and lesbian and they can actually separate out hip hop traditions where Baby Boomers and their parents hear it all as noise I just want to remind you that our parents call rock and roll and rhythm and blues noise they point out that there are important differences between hip-hop artists artists excuse me there's a difference for them between Lil Wayne and IM mortal technique or Lil Kim and Anna too they know that this culture that they've created is a mashup with permeable boundaries that this culture is simultaneously sac and profane with deep religious convictions and an Embrace of all things secular MC's like Lupe Fiasco or Omar offendum don't hide their Muslim faith they work in local National and Global context with music and film about Trayvon Martin an Arab Spring I think I can bring up one of these for you so hold on a second [Music] the Beed zra Twitter has a paralyzed 80 million strong and ain't no longer going to be terrorized organized mobilized focalized on the truth living proof that it's a matter of time for the chickens home to ro and it slowly ignited the firein people fight New Moon sh bright the man the de open the gates like the street but we've been empowered to speak and though the future is uncertain man at least it is imp when our children can be raised not in a cage but on a peak the inheritance of Mother Earth Freedom isn't given by press it's demanded by press Freedom LS Freedom Fighters fre to gather and protest for the God for freedom of the we know freedom is the answer the only is who's next for my G I haven't food I haven't me and my F be news Med I actually shared this video with some high school students at a high school in um Hartford Connecticut and the teacher said I've been trying to teach about Arab Springs with these kids and they're not interested but once you started with that they had a million questions they wanted to understand the parallels between say fighting for freedom in the US and in Egypt and this is really Egypt and it was the first time that some of our students had ever got engaged in questions of world and Global issues why because there was something about the way in which that presentation so we had we went through the lyrics um there's a line in it that says they're god-given rights to freedom and so we had this long discussion about okay but I thought they were Muslims all right but does that mean they don't believe in God I mean literally the kids tore the lyrics apart trying to figure out what was going on um those uprisings in the Arab world are fueled by the Technologies right the the ability to be on Twitter um and those of you who' been around for a few years know we had our own sort of CI civil disobedience in uh Wisconsin a couple years ago and so we had people marching around the capital because of the governor's decision and uh one of the things that happened was to feed all these Marchers and protesters there was a pizza uh parlor right near Ian's pizza with very famous pizza in Madison that has some pizza combinations that are should be against the law come on y'all macaroni and cheese pizza that's very wrong on so many levels um but what happened was people wanted first of all they could only serve the protesters because they had so many orders and so people were wanting to pay for their pizza and the pizza po owner said no all of these are paid for and they're like who paid for them he says well we got a couple orders here from Ireland there's some from New Zealand the Technologies allow people around the world to see what was going on and to participate in the CI civil disobedience in ways that Generations ago this stuff was always local and so we're teaching kids who are already in the world um in some fundamental ways they not not only are they doing music but they're doing film and filmmakers like Eli Jacob faly who makes Global hip-hop films like inventos hip hop Cubanos and homegrown hip life in Ghana now what I had to tell you about Eli Eli was quote a special ed student but he had a mother who was Savvy enough to get him out of there and he eventually graduated from the University of California Berkeley he's an incredible filmmaker he's finishing a film now that on hip hop in Colombia and we brought him to campus to talk about his work and you know one one of the questions was well how did you get to Cuba he said their ways he says I don't need to tell you but you could get to Cuba uh so there there these young people are doing things that you and I never imagined doing we just kind of went to school and deal with the teacher said do but they are their worlds are so much more expansive uh these young people are not Slackers who don't care about education quite the contrary they desire to be deeply engaged in learning but they don't want to receive a passive education where rope memorization and regurgitation passes for learning they want to innovate and create and implement they are as hip hop science educator Chris imden of teachers College Columbia University says scienc minded and as science-minded individuals they want to do science rather than read about it there are Scholars like Jeff Duncan Andrade at San Francisco State and Patrick Kaman at the University of San Francisco and Ernest Morel of teachers College Scholars like Donna Lissa Fisher of San Francisco State elain Richardson AKA Dr E of Ohio State University and Maisha win who's a colleague of mine at the University of Wisconsin Madison who understand why it's important for University Scholars and researchers to stay engag with communities and schools as teachers and as Community activists teacher college professor Mark Lamont Hill has found ways to engage media and conduct research so many of you probably see Mark on either huff post live live He's on CNN he's been interviewed several times by Pierce Morgan so he's both in a broader media environment as well as uh on a college campus H Samy Alim of Stanford University is working with hip hop and Global context uh Sammy actually is right now in in Cape Town South Africa and working with some artists there Sam sidel is working with TC Ellis and he's helped to document the work of the high school of the recording Arts uh where students who were previously headed for failure gain a second chance to put their Knowledge and Skills of popular culture and the Arts to work for both Fun and Profit actually um LeBron James has invested heavily in the high school and recording Arts um they do a number of PSA uh encouraging students not to drop out of school and so LeBron has just kind of bonded with these young people few years ago I had the pleasure of having dinner with um MC light well see where I am here I think I I showed this to students earlier today oh no this is uh samide El's work hello everybody listen to me no 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 hip-hop culture together students and I learned language arts life skills and to love each other and ourselves more as I continue to observe 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 Hip Hop the insanely Innovative and influential Global phenomenon that has emerged from those very same communities when I say hip hop I'm not just talking about music or music graffiti and dance which are considered its 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 hip-hop culture I'm talking about a 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 dancable segment over and over I'm talking about aspiring 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 High School Dropout from the projects of Marcy using his entrepreneurial hustle 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 hip hop genius creative resourcefulness in the face of limited resources or as it is often said in the hip-hop Community flipping something out of nothing how can this audacious approach impact our education system for starters we need to exhibit the Brash creativity of Hip Hop's pioneers just as hip-hop producers sampled songs from other genres creating unique new sounds to please audien's ears hip-hop Educators can borrow from diverse models and improvise Innovative blends of educational practices customized to meet students needs if that sounds too abstract take a look at the high school for recording arts in Minnesota where they've mixed Project based learning and Competency Based assessment with artistic vocational and business training with dual enrollment at local colleges with a heavy dose of student leadership we don't have to do the same thing that's been done before 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 adopt the value hip hop places on staying fresh a hot beat yesterday was a hot beat yesterday whoever sets 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 10 jobs in 2010 didn't exist six years earlier Hip Hop's premium on freshness must permeate our schools and we need to be resourceful in the 1970s thousands of families chose to replace their lolium floors in poor neighborhoods the old lolium was left in piles on the street young people without access to playgrounds or dance classes turned their parents trash into dance floors and invented new moves like the windmill and the heads spin 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 mic spray cans turntables and when it comes to their educations students have brilliant ideas and instincts hip hop genius is not just about teachers using hip-hop 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 as consumers but as creators we don't need to tweak the content inside existing traditional academic structures we need to think outside the classroom and build institutions that are fundamentally more responsive to Young people's interests and Ingenuity we need to create schools and school systems that not only teach hip-hop they are hip-hop [Music] that was uh Sam Sidell who works with the the high school for the recording Arts so in case you want to follow up with him so as I mentioned uh a couple years ago I had the pleasure of having dinner with MC light who was arguably one of the most significant voices in hip-hop culture and that dinner took place at the University of Wisconsin Madison where light had come to announce a partnership with our Innovative first wave Pro program the only spoken word scholarship program at a major university our first waivers have appeared on Broadway they have attended the cultural Olympics and the at the London Olympics and they've uh performed in Denver at the American sociological Association conference one of our first wave students Jasmine mans was named one of Glamour magazine's top 10 collegiate women uh Jasmine has had a had a book published in her sophomore year so when people tell me oh these the kids don't want to do anything yeah they do they want to do more than what we want them to do we have this marvelous opportunity to engage with the most exciting generation of young students the world has ever seen their passions and desires merge with new and exciting Technologies and they want teachers who will demand more of them than Googling some information and cutting and pasting it into a document they want to do and they want to create they want to inspire and innovate and they want to learn to think critically and analytically they want to be serious about education thank you so I don't know if you want want me to take a few questions okay great I'm happy to entertain a few questions okay yes m so I mean IB is one of those things that creates yet another track for some students um and I they're doing everybody's going to do IB okay uh what I find most interesting about Chicago they have one of the largest and most vibrant spoken word communities in the country we come down here a lot to search for students to offer scholarships to from the Spoken Word program because we have tons of IB students but we don't have tons of artists so I'm not against the programs uh but what I'm saying is there are some kids who will struggle mightily to get through IB programs our graduation rates are not going to improve just by saying oh we're going to have this sort of high stakes program high standards program and unless the teachers are thinking differently about how kids might access uh IB and I think I said this in one of the earlier sessions uh I teach I I give a workshop in the summer for um teachers who are advanced placement course teachers and about the fact that that we're missing a lot of kids in advanced placement and my Mantra when I speak to parents is make sure your kids take an advanced placement course they don't have to take all but let them take one and what they'll say back to me is well a teacher didn't recommend I said that's not what I say are you not paying taxes or if you're in a private school are you not paying tuition so you ought to have access to whatever is there the problem I have however is that on the one hand we're not getting all the kids who are eligible uh something like 75% of African-American students who do well enough on the PSAT to take an advanced placement course never take one and on the other hand the kids who do take them they're not taking them for the right reasons they're taking them because it looks good on a transcript and it they think it enhances their chances so one of the things that struck me in a uh film on advanced placement is the dean at Stanford de Deborah stipek talked about the fact that when she figured out that maybe advanced placement wasn't the way to go was that her own daughter took the French literature advanced placement and took the test and she said when she came home that day after having taken the test her first words were I never have to speak French again so is that the reason why we would want them to take you know wouldn't we want them to take it because they develop a love of and a deeper interest so that's my concern about IB that the only thing we want to do is to ensure that kids get into quote College as opposed to they develop a deeper and they have a deeper and richer educational experience if IB is just more of the same just more of it um I'm not sure how to make that successful for all kids so another question yes um this is not a flip question but if you didn't know uh how to speak Spanish what would you do okay you literally have to you'd have to study right right and that's what I'm saying I am in study mode myself I have read more books on hip hop and gone to more performances in the last three or four years um so that I can sort of be where kids are I actually do teach a course called pedagogical flows hip hop in the K12 classroom but I've you know it's been a steep learning curve because I was one of those people this is just noise no first of all it's a very old tradition it's it it it's like 40 years oh right and I'm like oh that's right Sugar Hill Gang right uh but to see its Evolution and particularly around what we might call the conscious uh um movement uh we run a public lecture series along with my course and uh this year we're having a lot more industry people come and talk about so we're having uh on Monday Jack Knight who is a songwriter and he's written for J low and um Diddy and a number of other people talk about the process of songwriting and what actually happens you know it's like seeing seeing the sausage made uh the following week we're having uh a guy named Ebro Darden who is the vice president of programming uh for Hot 97 in New York which is the Premier hip hop radio station and he's going to talk about you know how do some things get played while other things don't get played and and and what's you know what's what's the business driving and what's it trying to sell so you know my work has really been about figuring out okay how do we connect with these kids who they don't watch TV they they're doing all these other things uh who communicate differently and Hip Hop has become this vehicle I have been as I said earlier on six of the seven continents everywhere I've been I have en counter hip hop I have graffiti photos from Brazil Beijing um Australia I mean literally it is a worldwide phenomenon and we can keep our heads in the sand and pretend that it isn't but this is what kids are engaged in and I think we have an opportunity here as opposed to saying oh we can't deal with any of this stuff so it does require the reading the study for anything you'd want to know about okay yes yeah and I think that is the the the tough thing I mean I'm one of my own kids Works in technology and he's always telling me that you know what we have what what the public has access to is not where the technology folks are I mean that they're so far ahead of us literally uh and in fact I listened to a TED Talk given by John Negron in 1980 80 and he said yeah we're going to stop we're not going to use stylus you know to get on these devices anymore we're going to use our fingers there was no smart technology so there are people who are so far ahead of us Steve Jobs had patents for things that didn't exist you know how when your phone or somebody calls you and their number you can just touch their number and call them back he patented that idea and there weren't any cell phones so so I think it's tough for teachers to stay ahead of this and at this point our big job is to just try to stay current I'm not sure we can get ahead of some of these things um but one of the ways that we stay current is that we stay in communication so I mentioned to students earlier um we participate in a Twitter conversation every Tuesday night takes place at 8 o'clock Central 9 o'clock Eastern call hhip hoped and we talk about okay well how can you do this in a classroom and what are some of the ideas that we can incorporate and so this this conversation is wide ranging we have artists we have industry people we have teachers we have Community activist all thinking about how do we engage these kids La last Tuesday's conversation was about how do we deal with sort of the negative stuff because that's where the kids are quick to go to and kind of flip that and get them to go to to more positive images because the negative stuff is it just proliferates it's everywhere but that's true in every form not just hipop there's negative stuff and fashion there's negative stuff in movies I mean and so in some ways we do have to provide them with Alternatives that speak to them and and that's the kind of work we're trying to do right now yes thank you thank you okay great there there is a film uh documentary film called louder than a bomb that focuses on the Chicago lot than a bomb competition to won all these awards at Sundance and so you could actually just look at the film it follows four kids or five kids follows their whole lives and their process um just amazing there are more than 400 hip hop education programs in this country at the high school and college level and so folks like um uh Marta Diaz in um New York is compiling them so that you can at least see the compendium U there's something known as The Hip Hop archives uh Marceline Morgan is the curator and they are housed at Harvard so trust me people are figuring out this thing is serious and it's not going anywhere and we need to get ahead of it from the standpoint of putting more positive stuff out there uh for the kids yes mhm many of the pieces that the students perform take on some of the toughest issues you can imagine and the environment is is a is way up there is one of the things that they are deeply concerned about um and I'm excited about the merger of Science and Hip Hop because when we first started out people were like well I can see this in English and literacy oh I can see this a little bit in the history and social studies oh I can see it in music but you know we're in science and math and and what we're finding we're starting to connect up with the science and math people in really powerful ways and it's really been helpful um Chris imden who I featured and he's um the science genius that I showed earlier uh Chris has worked with with Marie cury Middle School in New York and so I went to visit and these kids were in a math class and their challenge was and he explains to them he says a cipher uh you know when you sit together as a group uh he says that's all scientists do he said you know these Journal pieces is nothing but it's like a cipher and when people write back against something you wrote it's just really a Rap Battle okay they're having a battle about about you know the validity of science so the latest rap battle of course is around mamography so you know is it work does it no it doesn't work yeah it work you know so he puts the kids in these little Cipher groups and they were working on they had to come up with a A hip-hop hook for mathematics they were studying and these are like sixth graders and this one group was doing uh a piece on fractions and the hook was well a fraction is just a part of a hole I said a fraction is just a part of a hole you know a fraction is just a part of a hole right and so the other kid had the the piece over explaining fractions he says Gloria every time someone says the word fraction in that classroom the entire class goes but a fraction just a part of a ho you know a fraction just a part of a ho now think about kids and quote fractions and how they go right but we're figuring out ways in which multimodal ways of reaching them become really important and I really want to underscore that because you start there doesn't mean you stay there what what you haven't seen is I have a playlist for my class when they come in music is playing and I got everything on there that's something I used to do as a middle school teacher and a high school teacher in Philly and and yeah I started with the stuff they liked but I also introduced them the stuff that they wouldn't ordinarily encounter and I never forget one day asking them well okay I'm gonna put some music on what do you want to hear and one of my quote recalcitrant Learners said can you put on that song you know he said that's my joint you know so if I had kind of forced that down his throat and said this is good music and what you listen to is bad music no but that's our role as Educators to to start where they are to use what they know but also to move them past that so that's to me hip hop is a vehicle it is not the end game here yes we we we don't had that much time honey I I could go home uh what you know at my own institution I have these wonderful deeply committed young people who want to be teachers many of whom are working in like what we call Su the student with wiconsin Education Association student uh iterations of the Teachers Association and so they'll often ask me to come and speak at their meetings and when they come and ask me can you come and speak to us about discipline I always say the same thing I said honey that's like asking me telling me look I just got engaged can you give me the name of a good divorce lawyer like how about enjoying the engagement how about enjoying the fact that you're going to get married where's the excitement about the teaching the discipline is going to come you're going to have to learn to do that but no matter what we do with you at Wisconsin I don't care how many A's are on the transcript I don't care how good your cooperating teacher says you are when you leave here you're going to be a beginner and you're going to make beginner mistakes so give yourself permission to make mistakes give yourself permission to begin trust me if I ever encounter those kids I had that first year I have so many M couples I'm so sorry because I didn't know what I was doing um you know and that you know the the the Dirty Little Secret of teacher education is that we can't teach you how to teach you will not become a teacher until you practice now it's also true of law medicine in any profession we can give you background knowledge but you don't become a lawyer until you practice law you don't become a physician until you practice medicine and you get better as you go along so yeah there's all kinds of things that I see people do um I will however you know the anthropologists and me will always uh want to know what's the the the larger context because just walking in and seeing something you may not know what you're seeing um so yeah okay can I one more yeah so I guess my bottom line question is always what are you trying to produce where you trying to get in the end if what you're trying to get in the end is a few people who are successful then you just keep on doing what you're doing but if what you're actually after is for cohorts of Excellence you got to change you have to change in some fundamental ways so that's always going to be the question for me what are you trying to produce I think I talked a little bit earlier about moving past this depth versus coverage kind of thing and thinking that I'm being rigorous because people are failing no you're not you're being obstinate and you're also believing that the most important person in that room is you so that's me that's my little so box okay am I keeping people yes so one of the things that I think is the saddest thing that I see maybe this answers her question a little bit is what I would call disempowered teachers that think they can't I can't do this because of that and until we get teachers to a place where they understand that they actually do have some power um we're going to keep seeing that uh I learned early in my teaching career if I don't ask you something then I don't have to if I don't ask permission then I don't have toh seek it right my very first year I was teaching I want to take my students on a field trip but all of buses had been commissioned and so I wanted to know if I could take them on public Transportation which was the kids I was teaching in South Philly weren't supposed to take them out the building right and I said to the principal I said uh so can I take these kids uh on this trip downtown so he's like now that you've asked me I have to tell you what the rule is I said so are you saying I can't take them he said now that you've asked me I have to tell you what the rule is I said oh so I can take he said now that you have asked me I have to tell you what the rule is I finally got it I said I ain't ask you nothing so there's a level of risk taking that people engage in to be great at anything whether it's Athletics the Arts scientists administrators they're the people who say you know what I know this ain't the way we've been doing it but I'mma do this thing so we are talking about a sense of Courage that we have to cultivate now can you do this in year one probably not but I had gotten so good at Community involvement that my principles couldn't get rid of me they would have an Insurrection because the community would no she leave her alone right because I put I invested deeply in in that community and they understood that I cared deeply about their kids so I know you have the sort of fresh enthusiasm of bring brand new but it's not it's not a bad idea to just lay back and get the landscape and then begin to figure out where can you build Coalition and alliances so that you know my my brother actually taught me this uh when I first went in a for a tenure track position and you know you so frustrated you know and scared about oh am I GNA be able to write this stuff and are they GNA give me tenure and my brother who has nothing to do with academ but speaks in sports metaphors because he knows that gets I can understand that he said you just have to go there and be Reggie Jackson I said huh he said you got to hit three home runs in October that's all you got to do he said they don't have to like you but if you hit three home runs in October girl you in that's what I did I wrote those pieces that were home runs so I didn't really care anymore whether people liked me or I fit in I did you know I I I took some risk the dreamkeepers is the most risky academic book of its time because it's not written in a way that academic books were written but I took that risk because I was trying to hit a home run I'm keeping folks from dinner so I'm gonna stop okay thank you