Could Class Be Better With AI + Hip Hop?

At a conference on culturally relevant pedagogy, New Haven educators learned that with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), students don’t have to just settle for the word ​“hamburger” in their essays.

Instead, they can write that ​“cheeseburgers are like a symphony of flavors with each ingredient representing a note in a complex harmony that dances across the tongue.”

They can lean in to such elaborate wordplay with the help of a wordsmithing AI-powered tool called TextFX.

The lesson was one takeaway from one of a dozen workshops hosted during Tuesday’s fourth annual virtual Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Conference. The two-day conference hosted by the Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Collective compensates New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) educators for spending two days during the summer learning about anti-racist classroom practices.

Nearly 200 New Haven educators registered for the conference, which took place on Tuesday and Wednesday via Zoom. Each day the educators participated in two 90-minute workshop sessions on topics ranging from fostering social and emotional wellbeing in classrooms to empowering multilingual learners and student-led action.

This reporter sat in on a 12:20 p.m. session on Tuesday entitled ​“Rhythms of Resistance: Exploring the Intersection of Hip Hop, Healing, Ethnic Studies, and AI.” It was hosted by Connecticut and New York social studies teacher Justis Lopez.

A group of 14 New Haven educators from Co-op, Barnard, Hillhouse, Cross, and King/Robinson joined the session.

Lopez, who is also a dancer and DJ, focused his session on the elements of hip hop music and the music’s healing benefits that can be used in the classroom to engage students. He also encouraged the room of educators to consider collaborative work with AI tools like TextFX — created in collaboration with rapper and record producer Lupe Fiasco to help other rappers — to encourage a love for wordplay among youth.

“I believe that music connects us to the highest sense of self,” Lopez said.

Throughout Tuesday’s session, instead of a traditional turn and talk in the classroom, Lopez assigned the educators to breakout rooms in pairs to discuss their experiences with music genres like hip hop and to consider using TextFX in the classroom.

Ryan Minezzi, a visual arts lead teacher at Co-op, told Lopez that when his stereo broke for a few months, ​“it felt like I lost a limb.”

Lopez pointed out the key role music plays for all — it’s a look at one’s identity, the world around us, and is a tool for fostering community, he said.

Next Lopez asked, ​“What role does music play in healing?”

Educator Gregory Jackson responded: music opens minds, hearts, and souls by allowing artists and listeners to connect over lyrical choices that express one’s challenges and thinking. ​“It can create pathways,” he added.

Lopez said discussions about music in the classroom can be a form of ​“healing-centered engagement.”

He continued that music can also play a role in ethnic study-focused work because of its storytelling. ​“Hip-hop was a seed of the ethnic study movement. It’s intersectional and empowering.”

He described the five elements of hip hop as emceeing, which tells stories on a microphone; DJing, which tells stories through tunes; dancing, which tells stories through movement; graffiti, which tells stories through visual art; and knowledge as an artist, which tells the story of themselves, the world, and transformation.

Because rap was born from technology like DJing, turntables, recording studios, and laying several tracks, Lopez said, it makes sense for tools like TextFX to play a role in hip-hop discussions today.

Cross special education teacher Ebony McClease responded that while she appreciates the possibilities of AI, she still struggles with tools like ChatGPT and finding their place in schooling because students aren’t using it ​“to make their message stronger but to make the message, period.”

“While trying to teach kids to be creative, you’ve lost your creativity along the way,” she added.

Jackson added that while he see the value AI adds to creativity, it reminds him of the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. ​“I wonder where the place of AI is when you can have the trajectory of an idea go into the nether space of knowledge,” he said, ​“and then come out on the other end because of algorithms as being authentic because it shows up on various hits.”

He also questioned how an educator can appropriately host such healing conversations about music with students while being concerned about conversation topics being taken out of context or being deemed inappropriate despite encouraging students’ critical thinking skills.

“Where does it situate itself when we’re trying to evaluate students on their ability to articulate their ideas? And will it replace us as educators?” Jackson concluded his questioning.

When asked about the key takeaways Lopez aimed for the group to leave with, he said he hopes the session left educators more open to collaboration with new-age tools. If student interests like hip-hop and AI are combined with lesson making, Lopez said, it allows them to foster a community and make learning fun.

He encouraged educators to bring TextFX into the classroom to build students’ curiosity around words through essays, poems, and theatre.

Toward the end of the session the educators reflected on the discussion. Hillhouse educator Kevin Barbero wrote in the Zoom chat, ​“If you pair this with lessons on plagiarism and its consequences, you’d have a great debate about the role of AI in our society.”

Educator Maxine Phillips from King/Robinson wrote in the chat, ​“You opened my curiosity to TextFX and AI. Thank you!”

During the conference’s final hour, keynote speaker and Executive Director of Rethinking Schools Cierra Kaler-Jones encouraged all educators to connect their lessons to what today’s students currently see in the world in order to foster a space for critical questioning and relevancy.

She emphasized the importance of ​“making curriculums relevant to students’ everyday lives, rather than using old methods that may be tired, or some things that students may not know, as examples in the classroom.”