Rhymes with a Reason: Hip-Hop as the Lesson

Too many students walk into classrooms and feel invisible.

Their stories aren’t in textbooks. Their cultures are studied from a distance, if at all. The traditional approaches to education—rigid and often disconnected from the lives of young people—leave students feeling unheard, unseen, and uninspired. This is especially the case for students of color.

Armed with the words of Nelson Mandela, Rutgers Graduate School of Education Associate Professor Dr. Lauren Leigh Kelly is fueled by the belief that “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

As a teacher in New York, Dr. Kelly saw what happened when students were asked to leave parts of themselves at the door in order to learn in the classroom. So, she brought hip-hop into the classroom—not just as music, but as a way to teach literature, identity, history, and critical thinking. The result? Students lit up. They talked about culture, love, power, and joy, and began to see themselves within the field of education, not just on the margins of it.

Years later, as a professor at Rutgers, Dr. Kelly would take that vision even further. Guided by her mentor at Teachers College at Columbia University, Dr. Ernest Morrell, she created the Hip Hop Youth Research and Activism (HHYRA) Conference—an annual, youth-led event that empowers high school students to share research, lead workshops, and rap truth through verse.

One of Dr. Kelly’s favorite reads, Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, shows that hip-hop is more than music—it’s American history, culture, and a blueprint for understanding how communities evolve. Teaching through hip-hop helps students think critically about their purpose and actively engage in shaping their future.

“My ultimate goal is to create a pipeline for more diverse youth to consider themselves educators or leaders,” says Dr. Kelly. “I want young people to be able to show up and think differently about school and education—ultimately helping to diversify the teaching force in America.”

Now in its seventh year, HHYRA has trained 20 youth leaders in teaching, organizing, and civic engagement. All are college-bound, in college, or graduates. Hundreds more have come to Rutgers campus to learn and lead in a space built for them.

One of those students is HHYRA alum Hector Cruz, who plans to pursue a career in law:

“Being involved with HHYRA rededicated my desire to do work in service of others. Working with youth and their families and hearing how their experiences with hip hop formed them—those things reoriented me. I want to pursue my life in a way that helps other people, especially people who came from where I came from—the Bronx, the middle class, the lower class, poverty—whatever that may be.”

For Dr. Kelly, the heart of the work is the young people themselves—those who, as she puts it, “had the courage and imagination to believe that another, better world is possible.”

Her current research project, Exploring Youth Imagination and Future-Building in a Student-led Learning Community, examines how activist-minded BIPOC youth envision anti-oppressive futures and create the educational spaces to realize them.

Dr. Kelly credits the original HHYRA youth team—Ally Smith, Safa Bilal, Sydney Grant, Darius Rush, and Alondra Contreas—for co-creating the vision and placing “complete faith in each other, in their mentors, and in the hope of what this space could be.”

In 2025, Dr. Kelly was named one of the nation’s top teacher educators by the American Educational Research Association. Her book Teaching with Hip Hop in the 7–12 Grade Classroom and popular GSE courses—like “Introduction to Hip Hop Education”—continue to inspire a generation of educators to reimagine what learning can be and do for youth communities.