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 culture, 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, culturally relevant texts, and rigorous student thinking. Participants encounter a curated mix of hip-hop texts, traditional literature, music, media, and other cultural texts. This session is hands-on and interactive; you will listen, examine, question, respond, and build to determine: What elements of popular culture 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
Participants will analyze rap lyrics as mentor texts for argument writing, aligned to GSE-ELA standards for grades 6–12.
Beats, Bars & Phonics: Hip-Hop in the Elementary Classroom
Hands-on strategies for using rhythm, rhyme, and call-and-response to build phonemic awareness and fluency in K–5 settings.
The Artist as Educator
Artists discuss what they learned about language, performance, writing, entrepreneurship, audience, and collaboration — and what those lessons mean for educators and students in the classroom.
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
Using hip-hop as a critical literacy lens to help students read, question, and respond to social issues — aligned to GSE-ELA informational text standards.
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 & Cultural Impact Award
This award recognizes scholars whose research, teaching, writing, or public scholarship has expanded understanding of hip-hop and its relationship to education, culture, identity, media, literacy, or social change.
2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Women Who Wow: The Cultural Scholars Panel
This panel brings together university scholars whose research examines hip-hop as a site of language, learning, culture, creativity, and intellectual inquiry. Panelists will share their scholarship and discuss how hip-hop and popular culture inform educational practice and literacy research.
3:30 PM – 4:00 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 ↗