Imagine being in a classroom with award-winning rapper Bun B as your teacher. Sounds like a dream, right?! One non-profit organization in Houston has made this a reality and reimagined the way students are learning. Reading With A Rapper is utilizing the DNA of ‘cool’ and putting it back into the classroom, essentially meeting students where they are at. We all don’t learn the same way and co-founders, Jarren Small and Douglas Johnson are breaking the glass that has since shielded an antiquated education system. During Q4 this year, RWAR introduced an ELA learning system through a classroom activation pop-up in Houston and Atlanta.

More RWAR details provided through press release:

RWAR was created in 2018 in order to relate English Language Arts (ELA) metrics and academics with socially conscious lyrics from known national recording artists, video content and technology. Through this platform RWAR relates and uplifts youth socially and academically to skills necessary to thrive in Secondary and Collegiate Level courses. Since RWAR’s inception, RWAR has toured the City of Houston with a series of demonstrations and events, touching over 30,000 students and educators of all ages and backgrounds.

In partnership with Kids Foot Locker, the RWAR classrooms came alive. The pop-up installation created an environment for learning that disrupted your standard aesthetic of textbooks and dry paint jobs. This classroom was a way to learn and decompress - the beauty in duality. Through lesson plans written by certified ELA teachers, students learned the building blocks that would help them in many other school subjects. The best part… it’s all working. Student grades and test taking skills are all being impacted positively. Empowering young women and men through engaging experiences not only intrigues them to learn more, but arms them with confidence to continue. Who wouldn’t want to learn rap lyrics with Beats headphones in school?!

We can’t wait to see what Reading With A Rapper does next for the next generation of students and our community overall. We can predict that the redesigned classrooms are only the beginning for RWAR, which has actually been working on these initiatives for many years.

To keep up with Reading With A Rapper and their next projects (like the RWAR Academy!) - check out their website below. You can always like, share, and comment through their Instagram or even make monetary donations through the website. Stay tuned for #THECULTUREVERSE.