Urban Word NYC,

NYU Center for Multicultural Education,

Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development,

& the Hip-Hop Theater Festival present:

 

Preemptive Education: Language, Identity & Power

Urban Word NYC's Annual Mentor, Teacher, Educator & Community Activist Training

[Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East]

 

Preemptive Education aims to examine the issues that affect today’s youth, while providing creative and practical resources to address them. Using the power of spoken word poetry and hip-hop as the lens to explore language and privilege, participants will learn best practices in student-centered pedagogy from professionals in the fields of education, youth development, and spoken word & hip-hop. Combining performance, panel discussions, and professional development workshops, Preemptive Education will provide comprehensive opportunities for educators of all levels.   

 

Opening Panel and Youth Performance: FREE  to the PUBLIC

FRIDAY October 2^nd, 7-9PM

Room 703, Silver Center

WORD LIFE:

A Performance and Conversation on Language, Identity & Power
Poets: Jamilla Lyiscott, Carvens Lissaint, Ceez, Thiahera Nurse

Respondents: David Kirkland, Ph.D., Regie Cabico, Black Artemis

This dynamic performance and panel series will start at the word. Three poems with three panels will interact and converge in a conversation that uses spoken word poetry to reclaim identities and challenge inequities around language, privilege and power. Using each poem as a starting point, panelists will address and illuminate issues around language privilege, youth voice, and social justice. Young poets from Urban Word NYC will provide the platform from which respondents and panelists will vision a new dialogue around the transformative power of spoken word poetry and the pedagogies that champion the voices of the next generation.

 

Weekend Training Series for Mentors, Teachers, Educators and Community Activists

SATURDAY & SUNDAY October 3^rd 9AM-5PM, October 4^th 9AM-2:00PM

 

This training series will provide educators with cutting edge best practices in social justice, spoken word and hip-hop education. This weekend participants will work with professors, activists, educators, emcees and spoken word artists to engage in the critical literacy work that Urban Word NYC is known for. The workshops are geared towards building foundational frameworks, that are then followed up by specific sessions for: writing mentors, NYU community members, and NYC public school teachers. The range of perspectives provided will bridge both theory and practical application, as well as inform your personal pedagogy to enable you to work and grow as an educator dedicated to liberatory education. Also included will be a lunchtime panel with the Hip-Hop Association, as well as presentations by NYCoRE, EARS, DNA works, and leaders from our sponsoring orgs. For a full conference schedule visit www.urbanwordnyc.org  

 

REGISTER NOW!

Suggested donation for weekend training is $100. Includes breakfast & lunch.

Please be sure to pre-register by emailing Program Director, Parker Pracjek at parker@urbanwordnyc.org

Training is free for UW mentors, NYU students and staff, and the Hip-Hop Theatre Festival staff.

For additional information, please call 212-352-3495. Scholarships available.

 

 

WEEKEND SCHEDULE:

 

NOTE: Sessions are constructed around a foundational workshop, then followed up by a choice of (3) follow-up workshops (Breakout Sessions) that are geared towards writing mentors, NYU students and NYC public school teachers. Choose the follow-up Breakout Sessions that best suit your needs and interests.

 

Saturday October 3^rd, 2009 9AM-5PM

Silver Center, Rooms 703, 701, 705, 713

 

9:00-9:30: Check in/Meet & Greet, Room 703

 

9:30-11:00: Foundation 1: Language and Liberation, David Kirkland Ph.D, Room 703

 

11:-12:30 Breakout Sessions

a)      Write How You Talk, Geoff Kagan-Trenchard, Room 701

b)      It is NOT what it is:  Multi Media Street Scholars Going From Conscious to Critical through Real Talk, Critical Literacies, Hip Hop, Love, & Anger, Youth Roots, Room 705

c)      Between the Beats: Finding and Creating Stories in Hip-Hop Music, Crystal Belle, Room 713

 

12:30-1:30 Lunchtime Panel: What’s New in Hip-Hop Education at NYU

 

1:30-3:00: Foundation 2: Hip-Hop, Critical Pedagogy & Social Justice Education, Marcella Runell Hall,

                                       Room 703

 

3:00-4:30 Breakout Sessions

d)      Poetry & the Political Imagination, Aracelis Girmay, Room 701

e)      Hip Hop As Pedagogy, Daniel Banks, Ph.D., Room 705

f)       Educator as Acivist: Because the Struggle for Justice Does Not End When the School Bell Rings, NYCoRE, Room 713

 

4:30-5:00 Keynote/Mid-Conference (w)Rap up -  with Steve Seidel

 

Saturday Workshop Sessions:

 

Foundation 1: Language and Liberation

Presented by David Kirkland, Ph.D.

 

This session examines the politics of language, exploring the power of the spoken and written word, always articulated in dialect, to construct our identities and unleash our powerful voices.  In this way, language plays an important role in both poetry and the arts.  A contested site, language is the place where youth struggle with words, theirs and others, to cultivate visions of justice and liberation.   In language, youth take on new meaning beginning with a voice and verb, where words when spoken have the power to transform the world inside-out.

 

Breakout Session A: Write How You Talk

Presented by Geoff Kagan-Trenchard

 

This is a creative writing workshop that draws on not only from the student’s personal experience, but vernacular. Students are encouraged to incorporate the creativity and rhythms found in their natural speech into poems, stories and monologues. The emphasis is on integrity and imagination. Writing prompts are taken from a variety of genres. From nationally recognized academic poets such as Jeffery McDaniel and Daphne Gottlieb to current Hip-Hop artists like Nas and Immortal Technique.

 

Breakout Session B: It is NOT what it is:  Multi Media Street Scholars Going From Conscious to Critical through Real Talk, Critical Literacies, Hip Hop, Love, & Anger

Presented by Youth Roots

 

How many times have you heard the submissive saying, “It is what it is”, where material conditions are complacently accepted as fitting within the “normal” order of things?  “It is NOT what it is” is a critical, interactive, multi-media, intertextual and youth-led workshop for youth, teachers, administrators, & youth developers of middle, high school, and college students.   This workshop presents the key components to a “flip the script” pedagogy used by an East Oakland, CA critical media & consciousness-raising program called “Youth Roots”.  The workshop uses the mediums of spoken word poetry, Hip Hop “cypher-ing”, critical media analysis of student created videos & songs, hands-on activities aimed to teach critical theory to youth, and Socratic-style dialog to challenge what constitutes as legitimate “text”, the politics of identity, and the commonsense mentalities in the media, Hip Hop, and with society in general that reproduce the societal structures of dominance over our urban youth.

 

Breakout Session C: Between the Beats: Finding and Creating Stories in Hip-Hop Music

Presented by Crystal Belle

 

This workshop will introduce methods of teaching storytelling techniques in the classroom by using hip-hop music as a model. We will listen to songs by Jay-Z, Lupe Fiasco and Lauryn Hill (while reading the song lyrics) and identify the storytelling techniques used in each song. Upon identifying the elements of storytelling, we will make connections to literary devices such as: setting, plot, character development, theme, etc. The essential questions include:  What makes a story a story? How does listening to stories via hip-hop and creating our own stories allow us to understand more about who we are? The goal of the workshop is to teach storytelling techniques with the aid of hip-hop, while teaching students how to create their own stories.

 

 

Lunchtime Panel: What's New in Hip-Hop Education at NYU

Presented by Hip-Hop Association

 

The lunch panel will include guests that represent the leadership of the new formed Hip-Hop Education Center for Research, Training and Evaluation housed at the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education at NYU. The Hip-Hop Education Center is an initiative created in collaboration with the Hip-Hop Association and the Center for Multicultural Education and Programs to establish the first premiere research center for the study, training, assessment, and advancement of Hip-Hop pedagogy. The panelists will focus on current unmet needs the Hip-Hop Education Center will address, who might be involved and who would benefit from the Center.

Panelists:

Martha Diaz (Director of Hip-Hop Education Center)
Marcella Runell Hall (Associate Director of CMEP and the Hip-Hop Education Center)
Dr. Eddie Fergus (Deputy Director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education)
Dr. Daniel Banks (Director of the Hip-Hop Theater Initiative)

 

Foundation 2: Hip-Hop, Critical Pedagogy & Social Justice Education

Presented by Marcella Runell Hall

This session will focus on the Hip-Hop & Social Justice model for Hip-Hop and education, as well as practical application. The aim of this type of pedagogical orientation is two fold and has both theoretical and methodological implications.  From a theoretical perspective a hip-hop pedagogy situates hip-hop within a socio-historical context.  It examines the values embedded in the culture and explores the social and political environments that give birth to these conditions.  Methodologically a hip-hop pedagogy focuses on strategies that speak to the cultural codes of hip-hop.  Methodological strategies help to create lessons and organize classrooms that utilize hip-hop with integrity instead of employing hip-hop as a pedagogical lure.  When educators utilize hip-hop as a lure they devalue the rigor found in teaching and learning environments that honor the lives of students who have meaningful and deep relationships with hip-hop culture. In addition to outlining the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this orientation, the workshop will also describe the process of teaching future educators how this orientation can be meaningfully integrated into school curriculum. 

 

Breakout Session D: Poetry & the Political Imagination

Presented by Aracelis Girmay

In his introduction to Poetry Like Bread, Martín Espada writes:

Poetry of the political imagination is a matter of both vision and language. Any progressive social change must be imagined first, and that vision must find its most eloquent possible

expression to move from vision to reality. Any oppressive social condition, before it can change, must be named and condemned in words that persuade by stirring the emotions, awakening the senses. Thus the need for the political imagination.

In this session, we will look at aspects of the relationship between poetry & the political landscapes of the 20^th & 21^st centuries. We will read from essays, letters, manifestos, & poems by writers including Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nazim Hikmet, & Anna Akhmatova. We will also engage in a series of writing experiments & investigations that will help us explode, construct, & re-explode our notions of the political poem--& the ways in which we might use these in classrooms, workshops, community centers. This will also be a space to discuss best practices, concerns, questions, & ideas while generating a list of resources (books, films, programs) that will be helpful to us as educators engaged/interested in the work of the political imagination.

 

Breakout Session E: Hip Hop As Pedagogy

Presented by Daniel Banks, Ph.D.

 

In this session, participants will discuss their own personal goals and ethos as educators and think about how to model the core values of Hip Hop culture in their pedagogy.  We will consider the intelligences and literacies of today’s young people “born under the sign of Hip Hop” and begin to think through alternative classroom methodologies that are resonant with these ways of knowing. This session includes interactive exercises and an introduction to Hip Hop Theatre.

 

Breakout Session F: Educator as Activist: Because the Struggle for Justice Does Not End When the

School Bell Rings

Presented by New York Collective of Radical Educator's (NYCoRE), Bree Picower, Natalia Ortiz, Rosie Frascella

 

In this context of increasing standardization and deprofessionalization of teaching, how can teachers stand up for justice in our schools?  In this interactive workshop, educators and allies will brainstorm barriers that impede social justice education in their own settings.  In groups, participants will brainstorm both individual and collective responses that we can engage in to change the conditions in which schooling happens.  We will also discuss ways in which collective teacher activism in groups such as NYCoRE can play a role in educational change on both a theoretical and practical level.

 

Sunday October 4^th, 2009 9AM-2:00PM

Silver Center, Rooms 703, 701, 705, 713

 

9:00-9:30: Check in/Meet & Greet, Room 703

 

9:30-11:00: Foundation 3: Student-Centered Freirian Pedagogy through Boalian Theater Praxis, Dr. Christina Marin, Room 703

 

11:-12:30 Breakout Sessions

g)      Lyrical Collisions: Hip Hop, Theater and the Spoken Word, Holly Bass, Room 701

h)      Rupturing Reality: Popular Culture and the Utopian Performative, Joshua Bennett, Room 705

i)        Creative Classroom Management, E.A.R.S., Room 713

 

12:30-2:00 Foundation 4: The Art of Storytelling: Validating Everyday Visionaries, Trish Hicks, Room 703

 

Sunday Workshop Sessions:

 

Foundation 3: Student-Centered Freirian Pedagogy through Boalian Theater Praxis

Presented by Dr. Christina Marin

 

This workshop focuses on the incorporation of Theatre for Social Change exercises based on the arsenal of Theatre of the Oppressed techniques. Participants will experience an interactive theatre workshop focusing on their "reading" of the world around them and their contribution to "re-writing" their world as they become agents of change.

 

Breakout Session G: Lyrical Collisions: Hip Hop, Theater and the Spoken Word

Presented by Holly Bass

 

This performance takes elements of hip hop culture and applies them to poetry and theater. Participants will hear spoken word poems, a monologue and even learn how to beatbox in less than 2 minutes. The accompanying writing workshop follows a traditional format. Starting with a source poem or lyrics (to be determined by the artist and the lead teacher in advance), students will first read and discuss the work, paying attention to content, style and form. A poetry exercise will help students individually generate new writing. We will share our brand new fresh writing and discover ways to enhance the performance of the work. The session ends with an open discussion about the work we’ve viewed, the creative process as well as the artist’s background and experiences.

 

Breakout Session H: Rupturing Reality: Popular Culture and the Utopian Performative

Presented by Joshua Bennett

 

The body I inhabit (and the soul I imagine rumbles within its confines) has, for as long as I can remember, been a contested site of identity. I grew up with little intimate contact with my father, lived in a predominantly Latino neighborhood, attended a Black church and was awarded an academic scholarship to an essentially all-white private school at the age of fourteen. Before I ever knew of “liminality” as a term, I knew of what it meant to be a liminal figure; an Ellisonian ectoplasm daily straddling the line between Black and not-quite-Black-enough, between poverty and privilege, between bullied weakling and feared/fetishized Other. This workshop is interested both in the ways in which we each fit into liminality as a mode of identity, and what strategies there are to use such a modality as impetus to create art that pushes the boundaries of perceived reality. By way of both extensive free writing, as well as close reading the work of poets such as Saul Williams, Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West, Prince, Dave Chappelle, and the late Michael Jackson, we will investigate the ways in which various artists have dealt with their own liminality by creating figurative utopias (a term which will be further unpacked during the course of the workshop) through their use of narrative, staging, and performance techniques. 

 

Breakout Session I: Creative Classroom Management

Presented by E.A.R.S. (Effective Alternative in Reconciliation Services)

 

Learn skills and techniques to better manage your classroom setting, including establishing community practices, developing empathy and understanding around the issue of bullying and related skills. Effective Alternative in Reconciliation Services (EARS) is a Bronx based youth organization with a citywide reputation in Youth Empowerment Training and Conflict Management.

 

Foundation 4: The Art of Storytelling: Validating Everyday Visionaries

Presented by Trish Hicks

 

This closing session will focus on the power of individual stories. As mentors, how can we help excavate the extraordinary events of daily life in a world that celebrates the "sensational"? What is the role of mentor in the process of nurturing emerging voices? How do we move toward, as Gilda Radner put it,"the delicious ambiguity" of the world and seek to shape it with our experiences?

 

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