Houston Non Profit Organization ‘Legends Do Live’ Brings Culture to the Classroom With ‘Reading With A Rapper’

If we told you there was a new way for your child to learn the English, Language, Arts, would you be interested?  Instead of being taught about similes and metaphors from a textbook, imagine sitting in class and your teacher put the lyrics to your favorite rap song on the board and asked you to identify certain things in the song. Would that keep your attention?

In an effort to bring culture to the classroom and help kids learn how to read in a non-traditional way, Legends Do Live founders, Jerren Small and Douglas Johnson, are spearheading their latest initiative, Reading With A Rapper.  The mission of RW/AR is to relate ELA academics with socially conscious lyrics, video content, and technology. Through this platform, RW/AR can relate and uplift youth socially and academically to skills necessary to thrive in Secondary and Collegiate Level courses. RW/AR held a pop-up demonstration at Microsoft located in The Hoston Galleria.  Upon arrival, guests were welcomed and given headphones to demonstrate “when culture meets the classroom.”

Johnson: We founded a non-profit five years ago. Through those five years we were able to be in the schools first hand with the students and really see what the problems are and we have noticed that ELA was a huge problem a lot of kids were having trouble reading, even all the way up to the high school level, so we got the idea of fusing pop culture, stuff that the kids like, and ELA.

Small: There is a culture shift with rap. You start seeing how rappers are reading Dr. Seuss books and the Migos were doing different things. If you remember how you retain your ABC’s,  it’s music. How do you know the 50 states? It’s music. People are tiptoeing around rap. Rap is the number one listened to music genre in the world. We are doing all these things for teachers when we do the non-profit, so we know about similes, metaphors, and sentence structure and a lot of times rappers do it and don’t even know they are doing it. So we fill like okay, how can we marry both of the worlds together so they can coexist.

Small: We started soliciting volunteers who went to school with us. We all went to Prairie View A&M University together. With Jeremy Grant and Rodney Alexander, being a special education teacher, we knew we were rapping, the fastest way it could get stopped is content. Also because of the image rap portrays or what people think it portrays. With Grant, we had to find a way to make it make sense academically, consciously, and socially to where it doesn’t defeat the purpose. We reached out to Grant and said this is our vision, can you help us? She wrote the whole curriculum. We were bringing this culture part and the education part. We are doing more music, more Technolgy, more social media type things because that’s how kids talk and relate. We can’t talk to them in a 1990 perspective that doesn’t work.

Small: If you couldn’t read or write them you couldn’t comprehend math. Reading is essential. Just to go a little bit deeper, it was against the law for us [black people] to read because the information was the key to get out. At the end of the day when we were looking at these numbers, 85% of the kids in juvenile are illiterate. You can’t ignore that number. You also can’t ignore the reason why they are in there so you go backward and you see 8,000 high school students can’t get a job because they can’t read. These are full-blown statistics that I think people kind of just brush over. Whatever you major in, whatever you want to do if you can’t comprehend or put stuff together and read, it’s not going to work.

What type of impact do you want Reading With A Rapper to have?
Small: We definitely want to say international. This is something big where we can introduce different languages to kids. Different cultures to people, to where you can dismiss the stereotype of what you hear about someplace you have never been. If I can bring a kid to Nigeria without them stepping foot into Nigeria, they would think it’s mind-blowing. Ultimately, a lot of schools and a lot of kids are put in this position to where can’t pass their standardized test then they can’t excel in life. It’s like this test determines the rest of my life so I have to pass this test when really that doesn’t determine it.

Johnson: At the same time, when you are supporting/highlighting artist of different cultures, creeds, and races, that are supporting a positive message you are pushing more out more positivity instead of the alternative.

Small: We have a music research department so we actually go out and listen to a certain artist, who don’t even know we are listening to them, and we reach out to them. We think you would be a good fit for this xyz, would you be interested? So, a couple of people on the team already listened to Delorean, and he had just had a project come out and so what the other side of RWAR does if you step away from the ELA and education side, it provides another lane for the artist to be promoted to have their music listened to. With Delorean, we felt like his comments and what he was talking about, and we get in towards of more of an adult’s crowd, because we had more adults here today. These people are stakeholders and people who make decisions for kids.

Small: The way that gentrification works in lower income societies, they start with schools. When the schools are not attractive parents tend to want to move their kids away or just move out of the neighborhood. When you do that, it gives them, and we know who them is, enough time to come in revamp and change it up like we are going to help you. So now we want to move back in and put our kids in it because at the end of the day, the number one thing that moves everybody is kids. If a school is giving the best thing and they are passing and excelling, naturally you will want to put your kid in that school. So if you get a school to where it has a heavy Hispanic or Black percentage and they are staying out of trouble that sounds really attractive, I want my kid to be in that. So now as a community we have all the school doing that and the enrollment is up, the academics are up, attendance is up. The schools get more money based on attendance. So its a trickle effect on how we do everything.

Small: It will probably be 2019-2020 we want a full school year. We started the promotion in the fall and then when spring comes there are STAR and finals, spring break, black history, a lot of things already in place to where you really can’t show the metrics of it.

Johnson: The common misconception is that a lot of people think that it has been around longer than it really has been because we have been moving so fast. We just came out in August.

Small: That really shows you the need of it. The need for it is so big, and Hip-Hop is such a big conversation and education is such a big conversation in the country right now, just even in politics. So its like how did yall marry these to where they can coexist in one room and we figured it out