Community and Classroom Connection

Hip Hop helped to save my education, and my life as I started reading poetry and writing rhymes at 11, I was discovered as a poet while becoming a college student leader and activist.  

Latina/o Graduation Program "La Celebracion"

I linked communities through hosting, performing, reciting, and planning events in diversity. This would become part of co-founding the first Latino/a Graduation Convocation, which would become an ongoing partnership between the Latino community, professionals, arts & humanities, and future generations of Latino/a graduates and their supporters.

Ridge Coalition for Peace and Justice

I spent some time in extracurricular settings volunteering for a Summer program with the Ridge Coalition for Peace and Justice (Formally the Paradise Center for Tolerance and Non-Violence) - summer diversity fair in Chico, CA. Reciting poems, giving speeches for May 1st, Immigrant Rights day, and integrating my studies into the poetic. 

 

I include parents in the conversation before, during, and after conducting the curriculum, to have them understand in writing what my curriculum’s aims, goals, and tools are. I invite them to take part in any section of the lessons, as I seek to promote the positive essence of Hip Hop culture and the power of language for youth.

As a poet and Hip Hop generation, I wanted our community to notice that Hip Hop is a culture of people, living, working, and breathing the same air as most. I took part in a local community event with cultural and musical centers like the Arlene Francis Center for Spirit, Art, and Politics, where I formed relationships with youth, activists, and cultural workers to show and see where education meets the community. 

We are currently sifting through an era in education that focuses on the conformity of intellectual talents through the standardization of knowledge by testing, in order to secure quantifiable data for federal funding. We cannot continue to "taxonomize" differences that stratify learners, or their communities based on fallacious equations of aptitude within the factor of socioeconomics, and culture. 


With the investment and collaboration of CHOP's Teen Club, I was able to reach out and form an educational site with youth workers as part of the community in an area where music, youth-in-need, and culture thrived. This is where community and education should always meet, especially during the summer months when many learners tend to lose reinforcement of intellectual pursuits and opportunities to further their education. 

Then, I volunteered within my professional capacity as a Secondary Tutor at Roseland University Preparatory Academy in the neighborhood I grew up in; teaching learners the craft of language and intra/interpersonal expression through Hip Hop and Spoken Word Poetry. 

I volunteered for a "Write the Power": Poetic Medicine - Workshop for Raizes Collective, poet Anaid Carreno and I, facilitated youth in their writing of their poetry in various forms, over two hours, they then could perform their pieces in spoken word on our stage with a microphone for an audience. Keeping copies of their pieces continues dialogue with learners and keeps them engaged in language learning through regular workshops. 

Here is a sample of curriculum I revised for the English as a Foreign Language Conversation Corner I held while Teaching, and I infused short song and poetic writing into my English as a Foreign Language Teaching in Mexico as well, where many students took a social justice stand supporting LGBTQ human beings in their communities.  

I presented, performed, and held a workshop to sample my curriculum at the first "We the Future" Social Justice Conference on the Petaluma Campus of Santa Rosa Junior College. Language for Social Justice Communities. 

I have conducted a workshop for Martin Luther King's Day on, not a Day off with Santa Rosa Community Baptist Church. 

 

 

 

I also infused rhythm, rhyme, syncopated drumming, and formed Hip Hop versions of music songs for Kindergarten through 5th grade students at Guerneville School. 

Hip Hop figurative and literal language provides the building of language communities from the locality, neighborhoods and lineages of the learners, and the teachers. So, while teaching ESL, College Skills, Social Studies, and Literature, I will continue building safe and positive environments in and outside of class for them and their families.