75. Prepping Kids for the Real World with Culturally Responsive Education

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kids (teenagers!) are so hard to understand, right? That’s because they are part of their own culture; it’s called Youth Culture. And unfortunately, most schools don’t teach with their culture in mind. Instead, schools are focused on traditional (adult-perspective) teaching methods. Methods that don’t work.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Imagine schools that not only teach in ways that engages students but that also helps our youth learn true real-world skills that they can take with them into their post-secondary lives. Sound like fiction?</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s not. This week’s guest, Jamel Mims, is spearheading a movement to implement culturally responsive programming in high schools. This means he’s helping schools and students leverage the teens’ innate ability to teach themselves with the tools available to them (um...the internet) and creating classrooms that allow them to thrive.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This is the direction education needs to go, and you can do it in your schools, too!</span></p> <h2> </h2> <h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">About Jamel Mims:</span></h2> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamel Mims is a bilingual rapper, interactive media artist, and edtech cofounder with over a decade of experience implementing culturally responsive programming in high schools across New York City. A Fulbright Scholar who studied hip hop culture in China, his work is firmly rooted in centering youth culture in academic spaces, and ranges from developing curriculum that uses original hip hop music to teach test prep, creating virtual reality and mixed reality experiences, public demonstrations and social justice campaigns. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">An emerging leader in the field of culturally responsive pedagogy, he has presented at New York Tech Meetup, Google for Education, SXSW Edu and SXSW Interactive. His work in music, technology, education and activism has been featured in th