March 12–13, 2027
Conference Schedule
March 12–13, 2027 · Atlanta, GA
Schedule subject to change. All sessions are aligned with Georgia ELA Standards (GSE-ELA).
Friday, March 12, 2027
The Inner Circle
Designed for participants who want to experience literacy, hip-hop, and instructional leadership from the inside.
5:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Registration & Welcome
Check in and connect with fellow Inner Circle participants.
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
The Curriculum Cipher
An interactive experience designed especially for educators and school leaders who need a sharper eye for instructional materials, relevant texts, and rigorous student thinking. Participants encounter a curated mix of hip-hop texts, traditional literature, music, media, and other contemporary texts. This session is hands-on and interactive; you will listen, examine, question, respond, and build to determine: What elements of popular media actually require students to think? What deserves to stay? What needs to be reworked? What needs to go? Using The Principal's Audit, you will examine whether a lesson creates meaningful opportunities for students to analyze, evaluate, apply evidence, and construct ideas. You will leave with a practical lens for evaluating instruction and a deeper understanding of how hip-hop texts function as academic texts.
The Producer's Classroom
Step behind the turntables and learn the fundamentals of DJing through hands-on instruction. Participants will learn how to manipulate a vinyl record, find a beat, perform a basic baby scratch, and create a short scratch pattern of their own. Throughout the experience, participants will explore how DJing engages core learning skills such as active listening, sequencing, pattern recognition, rhythm, timing, and oral language. The experience is structured around a simple learning progression: Listen — Identify beats, sounds, patterns, and changes. Analyze — Determine how sounds are sequenced and repeated. Practice — Manipulate the record and respond to auditory cues. Create — Develop an original scratch pattern. Transfer — Connect the DJ skills to classroom applications in literacy and learning. No previous DJ experience is required.
7:30 PM
Closing Rally
Come together to close out the evening and celebrate the Inner Circle community.
Saturday, March 13, 2027
Main Conference
A full day of workshops, panels, and keynotes on literacy, hip-hop pedagogy, and instructional leadership.
8:00 AM – 9:00 AM
Registration & Welcome Breakfast
Check in, pick up your materials, and connect with fellow educators over breakfast.
9:00 AM – 9:45 AM
Opening Keynote: The Literacy We Were Never Taught
An opening address exploring how hip-hop has always been a literacy practice — and what that means for classrooms today.
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Verse as Argument: Teaching Persuasive Writing Through Rap Lyrics
This workshop examines rap lyrics as a legitimate and rigorous genre of argumentative writing — one that employs claim, evidence, counterclaim, and rhetorical appeal with the same structural intentionality found in canonical persuasive texts. Participants will engage in close reading of selected rap lyrics as mentor texts, analyzing how artists construct and sustain an argument across verses, deploy figurative language and diction as rhetorical tools, and position an audience through voice, tone, and cultural reference. The session draws on argument writing frameworks from the Common Core and GSE-ELA standards for grades 6–12, with particular attention to ELAGSE6-12W1 (argument writing) and the informational reading standards for literary nonfiction. Participants will leave with annotated mentor text sets, a transferable close-reading protocol for argument analysis, and classroom-ready writing prompts that scaffold students from lyric analysis to original argumentative composition.
Beats, Bars & Phonics: Hip-Hop in the Elementary Classroom
This workshop examines how the sonic and structural elements of hip-hop — rhythm, rhyme scheme, and call-and-response — function as research-supported tools for building foundational literacy skills in K–5 classrooms. Participants will explore how beat-based instruction activates phonemic awareness by training students to isolate, segment, and manipulate sounds within words. Rhyme patterns drawn from hip-hop texts serve as scaffolds for phonological processing, decoding, and spelling pattern recognition. Call-and-response structures provide repeated oral practice that builds prosody, fluency, and automaticity in early readers. The session is grounded in the science of reading and aligned to GSE-ELA foundational skills standards for grades K–5. Participants will leave with classroom-ready routines, annotated text examples, and a framework for evaluating hip-hop texts for instructional use across the literacy block.
The Artist as Educator
This session examines the instructional parallels between artistic practice and evidence-based teaching, with direct implications for educator professional development in high-need school contexts. Practicing artists — working across music, spoken word, and visual media — will share how their creative process mirrors the cognitive and communicative demands placed on students in rigorous literacy classrooms: drafting and revising for audience, constructing meaning through language, managing feedback, and producing work that demonstrates mastery. Participants will analyze these parallels through the lens of high-leverage instructional practices, including explicit modeling, structured academic discourse, and iterative writing. The session is designed to support teachers in Title I and other high-need settings who are seeking culturally grounded, research-aligned approaches to student engagement and literacy achievement. Participants will leave with a transferable framework for using artist-as-model as a classroom instructional strategy, along with discussion protocols and text-based activities aligned to GSE-ELA speaking, listening, and writing standards.
Atlanta Hip-Hop Legacy
Atlanta's Hip-Hop Legacy: Language, Literacy, Storytelling, and Learning. This session focuses heavily on local Atlanta artists and how their work — their language, their stories, their craft — can be brought directly into the classroom. Featured artists may appear in person.
11:15 AM – 12:15 PM
Cipher to Classroom: Freestyle as Formative Assessment
Explore how the freestyle cipher can be adapted as a low-stakes, high-engagement formative assessment tool across content areas.
Reading the World: Critical Literacy Through Hip-Hop Texts
This workshop equips educators with a structured, evidence-based framework for using hip-hop texts to develop students' critical reading and analytical writing skills — with direct application to school-wide literacy goals and Title I professional learning priorities. Grounded in critical literacy theory and the informational reading standards of the GSE-ELA framework (ELAGSE6-12RI), the session positions hip-hop as a high-interest, culturally relevant genre of nonfiction that demands the same close reading skills required of any complex informational text: identifying central ideas and supporting evidence, evaluating an author's purpose and point of view, analyzing how word choice and structure shape meaning, and distinguishing between fact, inference, and perspective. Participants will work through a replicable instructional sequence — from text selection and scaffolded annotation to structured discussion and evidence-based written response — that can be implemented across grade levels and content areas. The session addresses the needs of students in high-need schools by centering texts that reflect their linguistic and cultural experiences while maintaining the rigor required for academic literacy growth. School leaders will leave with a clear rationale for embedding critical literacy instruction into their school improvement plans, along with a ready-to-use professional learning protocol, text sets, and a classroom observation guide aligned to high-leverage literacy practices.
Beats, Bars & Phonics: Hip-Hop in the Elementary Classroom
What happens when students move from reading a story to becoming its creators — and then use technology to bring that story to life? This interactive session, presented by STEAM Dreams Studios, demonstrates how Comics 2 Classrooms uses comics, storytelling, visual literacy, and STEAM activities to create accessible entry points into reading, writing, vocabulary, comprehension, and creative expression. Participants will experience a mini Comics 2 Classrooms lesson and explore how a comic can become a launch point for multidisciplinary literacy activities. The session then moves from creation to play with a live showcase of Wurzzle, a multiplayer word game available on web, PC, and mobile. Participants will see firsthand how game-based experiences can reinforce vocabulary, communication, collaboration, and rapid literacy decision-making in K–5 settings.
12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Lunch & Networking
Enjoy lunch and connect with educators, presenters, and school leaders from across Georgia.
1:30 PM – 2:30 PM
Read Write Rhyme Hip-Hop Scholarship & Impact Award
This award recognizes scholars whose research, teaching, writing, or public scholarship has expanded understanding of hip-hop and its relationship to education, identity, media, literacy, or social change.
2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Women Who Wow: The Scholars Panel
This panel brings together university scholars whose research examines hip-hop as a site of language, learning, creativity, and intellectual inquiry. Panelists will share their scholarship and discuss how hip-hop and popular media inform educational practice and literacy research.
3:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Book Signing & Networking
Connect with fellow attendees and presenters while meeting featured authors and scholars during an informal book-signing and networking session.
4:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Closing Reflection & Next Steps
A collective closing session to synthesize the day's learning, share commitments, and celebrate the community.
Ready to Join Us?
Secure your spot for two days of workshops, panels, and peer collaboration — March 12–13, 2027.
Register Now ↗