Hip-hop High (High School for Recording Arts)

Narratives

Architect Narrative

This high school is about at-risk kids, project-based, real world learning, and hip-hop. Core curriculum areas such as math, science, and language arts are offered, and students are required to spend time gaining mastery in each of these areas before they are given studio production time. The school has its own record label, and produces high-quality CDs.

Most of the staff members are musicians as well as teachers. Many of the students are former dropouts and have jobs and families. They came back to school because it’s a happening, caring place, where they can learn about something that inspires them and gain a marketable skill.

Many of us think that hip-hop is about loud, shocking lyrics and primitive, bump-your-ass movements. While planning this school, I learned that hip-hop is about more than that. It’s a form of poetry. Its about finding words to explain your life, you culture, your anger and your love. It’s about getting your business act together, getting recorded, learning math, and presentation skills. It’s about integrating all of these things with your family, friends, community and your education.

The school’s founder is a hip-hop artist, and has a platinum album under his belt. He performs a rap song about hitting bottom, and finding his center; the school lifts him, the teachers, and the kids. He likes to use the expression “I feel you.” This expression is a succinct way of describing how I like to begin the planning process–hanging out with the people that will be a part of a school.”I like to feel you.” When I asked the kids what the school was about, they said, “Hip hop.”

The school’s founder says that a lot of these kids, if not at this school, would be strung out on drugs, in jail, or dead. The general approach in America since the 1954 Brown vs. Brown desegregation legislation is to give these kids an equal education and an equal facility. But these kids’ lives are radically different from those of their affluent peers on the other side of town. It didn’t make sense to give them the same kind of environment. My thought was to give them something unique, not equal; more about recognizing them for who they are than about trying to make them into suburban kids. Besides, most of the schools that I visit are only half-way alive - there is little integration between linguistic, mathematical, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal and interpersonal intelligences; we wanted something more tailored to a hip-hop culture.

The project involves a 7,500 SF expansion for studio, gathering, performance, and individual workstation space. A previous phase, by another architect, included 10,000 SF, constructed to fairly typical office build-out standards. This expansion utilized adjacent industrial space. There are no windows in the new space, and the budget was minimal, so color, texture, and arrangement of form were mostly what we had to work with.

The design solution involves two major spaces: a quieter area for individual workstations and an adjacent apace for gathering, projects, and performance, separated by operable, glass overhead doors. Desks, salvaged from a downtown office building, were ganged together, and we built the workstation enclosures around them, creating clusters of 15 student advisory groups.

The result is edgier than most schools. The colors are wilder and the workstations, constructed of corrugated metal siding, are more “LA cool” then heartland solid. A graffiti wall and a portable stage provide a place for kids to use their words, their poetry and their art. Visit this school, watch these kids work, watch them perform, and a voice inside you will say: “I feel you.”

Educator Narrative

The educational program operates together with a professional music production studio. Learners’ time is split between individual learning in traditional academic areas, instruction in critical areas of the music industry, and time spent developing and mastering production and performance skills in the recording studio. Academic material must be mastered each day before students can use the recording studios. Students are attracted to the recording studio, which furnishes a rationale for academic learning.

Learners spend a portion of their day in a conventional classroom setting planning and developing projects, and working through a skills based curriculum based on the state’s high standard areas. The school has adopted Project Based Learning as the underlying theme of its curriculum. In project based learning, students take an active role in their education. Learners meet daily with their advisor to plan each day’s activities. Learners propose projects that will cover graduation standard areas with their advisors. Sometimes the projects will involve large groups of students, more like a class, other times learners may work in small groups or alone to complete their objectives. Throughout the day, learners travel between resource areas in the school, working on their projects. Facilitators of learning staff the resource areas and assist students in gaining the skill sets necessary to complete their projects.

Each week the entire academic staff reviews each individual learner’s achievement. Those students who are progressing in all of their academic endeavors receive an all-access pass the following week. The all-access pass opens certain additional resources to the learner, like time in the main music studios and participation in extracurricular activities and projects.

The curriculum utilizes real-world examples in the music industry wherever possible to keep learners engaged in the educational program. For example a science curriculum is built around electronic audio production and acoustics, a math course is built around planning a budget for a CD project. Learners’ projects can be focused on any subject area, and many learners choose to work on a CD project. Through the process of completing this project a learner may: track music in the studio, contract with other musicians, vocalists and engineers for services, make a project budget, design a CD cover, make a marketing plan including posters and promotional materials, file copyright forms, negotiate a contract with a record label, etc. Through a single project learners can gain a wide array of skills and cover a several graduation standards areas. This program retains a population of learners that cannot be accessed or who cannot achieve success through traditional classroom methods.

This skill based learning method measures students’ competence rather than time spent in a classroom. Competence in a specific area means that the student has demonstrated a behavior, ability, skill, quality, knowledge or aptitude at a level acceptable to a qualified observer. Individual tutoring is available to ensure that learners are progressing academically. As a part of the program, learners are required to pass the state basic standards tests. Once learners complete the basic standards they go on to work on the graduation standards areas.