The people that were my mentors were all keepers of culture. Jihad Aziz, Saafir Rabb, Toby Jenkins and Clayton Walton were the most important teachers I had in college and I never took a class with any of them. They were all my mentors and in their own way they each helped me to add context to what I was learning in class and trying to do as a student leader. This is the role that all our master of arts played in the lives of our students. They are people adding on to the educational experience by helping to add a context, make connections, and fill in gaps missing in our student’s educational experience. These relationships are at the center of our approach to creating transformational learning experiences.

I share all this to provide a context, to locate myself as a leader and creative. It’s important to know that the people that do this work are usually the adult version of the young people that need this work the most. In the formation of Words Beats & Life, we understood that culture is about passing down history, tradition, and identity. For many Americans regardless of racial identity, culture is something discussed primarily during cultural heritage months, holiday and family gatherings. Often time’s culture is not taught using school-based methods of education. It is handed down through experience, from elders, parents and community members through music, food, dress and language. Hip-hop becomes the perfect vehicle to hand down traditions related to technology, politics, culture, and tradition in America and around the world.

It is important to acknowledge that Black boys are often learning about themselves through life experiences, while participating in a traditional educational experience that asks them to leave that knowledge out of their engagement with history, literature, math, and science. Culture matters, and participating in an educational experience that centers your experience, as a human being, living in the world at a particular time, is vital. Good teachers know this in traditional and community based alternative classrooms. This is why they often work to make cultural heritage months meaningful for students to learn about themselves and other. Hip-Hop allows us to teach the full spectrum of human history 365 days a year through music, visual art, textile designs, dance through knowledge of self, the 5th element of hip-hop.

Traditional schools based approaches to identity however is almost exclusively rooted in understanding the past, but rarely about helping students to understand the current moment as they prepare for their futures. The freedom to create transformational educational experiences in non-traditional classrooms has been central to the approach of Words Beats & Life to education. Because we are not a school, we have a different kind of freedom not simple to create classrooms, but rather to create communities. Our community breaks geographic boundaries by having all sites open to anyone who can get there, age boundaries by having such a large cross section of ages of students to apply. We also often have multiple classes taught in the same space so students can float from class to class and engage in ways that make sense for them.

We know the value of assessment, evaluations and experiential learning opportunities. We evaluate multiple forms of learning including belong, school engagement, community service hours, skill set mastery, and promotion with-in the program based on skills mastered, knowledge and performance. We have built a culture of celebration and collaboration among students and among teachers. This works especially because our work is rooted in Hip-Hop.