Creating a Framework that Draws on our Strengths and Experiences to Build, Inspire Ingenuity, and Exercise Persistent Resilience in the Face of Interlocking Systems of Oppression.

• In Event: Dreaming (A)loud for Liberation: Build With Hip-Hop Pioneers, Practitioners, and Scholars to Design a Hip-Hop Framework for Educational Research, Practice, and Assessment

Abstract

Another panelist is a poet, kindergarten teacher, meditator, scholar, and civic leader who has taught for several years in primary schools in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.. She is known for her poetry, debate acumen, leadership, and unique teaching methods that are grounded in a love ethic (hooks, 2001) and Hip-Hop culture. As a teacher, she builds with parents and other teachers to tirelessly advocate for young Black and Brown scholars.

Ever since she was a teenage girl growing up in Seattle, she has been unwavering in speaking out against educational inequities, racism, classism, and heteropatriarchy. In high school, she demonstrated this commitment and through hosting rap battles and public debates and presenting at national education conferences, through which she was able to help create and sustain a form of Hip-Hop debate education that has touched thousands of lives around the United States. Now, as a poet, scholar, kindergarten teacher, and educational leader, she draws on Hip-Hop culture to write, research, design curriculum, and mentor teachers.

For this symposium, she hopes to contribute to a framework that speaks truth to power and enables researchers and practitioners to draw on each other’s strengths and experiences to build with one another, inspire ingenuity, and exercise persistent resilience in the face of interlocking systems of oppression (Collins, 2009).

Author

• Ethiopia Berta