Sam Seidel
is the Office of Public Engagement’s first Community
Fellow, serving for
the 2009-2010 academic year.
As a Community Fellow, Sam will be working with the Office to support the practices
of and advance conversation about artists and designers engaged in community teaching.
Over the last decade, Sam’s work has focused on the
intersections between education, arts and incarceration. Trained and certified as a high school
Language Arts teacher, Sam has taught a variety of ages and subjects from first
grade reading to post-secondary screenplay writing. He directed AS220 Broad Street Studio, a grassroots
arts
program for young people in and transitioning out of prison and was the
founding director of the Maysles Institute youth documentary film program. As a consultant, Sam has worked for a
spectrum of clients on a diverse set of projects, ranging from being hired by a
government agency to reconfigure a statewide juvenile justice system to working
with the Rockefeller family to repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws. For the last four years, Sam worked
with a national network of organizations funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation to start and support innovative high schools across the country. As a writer, Sam has contributed to
national education journals and anthologies about political prisoners. His latest effort is Hip
Hop Genius,
a book that explores existing and potential intersections between Hip-Hop and
education.
In addition to collaborating with the Office
on projects related to pedagogy and being available to meet with faculty and students, he will also be
completing his manuscript while in residence. An overview of his book follows:
Our
society
is drastically failing to educate our youth. Every 26 seconds a student
drops out. And the rates are much worse in low-income, urban, Black and
Latino areas. Yet it is in these exact communities that Hip-Hop--an
artistic form and lifestyle that has taken over as the premiere pop culture
globally--was created.
How
do we
change our view of education to build on the brilliance that young people
possess? How do we create institutions that incorporate Hip-Hop's
culture, creativity, and entrepreneurship?
Hip
Hop Genius answers
these questions by describing the unique curriculum and environment inside our
country's first Hip Hop High School. The book also tells
the inspirational story of the school's founder, David "TC" Ellis, a former
high school dropout, who recovered from a drug addiction to become a major
label rap recording artist, and who now runs one of the most innovative high
schools in the country.
The
first
book to quote famous Hip-Hop artists, such as Jay-Z, alongside famous
educators, such as John Dewey, Hip
Hop Genius bridges
the
worlds of Hip-Hop and education and sets the stage for a conversation that has
been brewing for the last decade about the powerful, yet largely untapped
potential of Hip-Hop in the struggle to eliminate the achievement gap that
currently plagues our nation.
