The Read Write Rhyme Conference invites educators, instructional coaches, researchers, and school leaders to submit proposals for concurrent sessions aligned with this year’s theme.
This conference creates space for bold thinking grounded in scholarship and practice. We convene educators who engage hip-hop as discourse, pedagogy, literacy practice, and intellectual tradition. We welcome sessions that move beyond surface engagement and demonstrate how hip-hop shapes cognition, curriculum, leadership, and institutional culture.
We invite presentation proposals in one of the following strands.
- Advancing Past Analyzing Lyrics
We honored fifty years of hip hop. Now we move further. Hip hop is more than a motivational hook or lyric annotation strategy. It is a complex literacy system that includes visual rhetoric, branding, sampling, spatial design, performance, digital circulation, and audience construction.
We seek sessions that:
• Examine hip-hop as multimodal text
• Engage critical literacy frameworks
• Explore sampling as revision practice
• Analyze visual culture, fashion, and media ecosystems
• Connect hip hop to disciplinary literacy in ELA, social studies, STEM, and the arts
• Demonstrate how hip-hop advances higher-order thinking
Presenters should make clear how their session strengthens analytical rigor and supports measurable academic outcomes.
- Women in Hip-Hop. Girlhood. Identity. Literacy as Resistance.
Hip-hop is text, image, brand, and pedagogy. We seek presentations that examine how girls and women in hip hop shape discourse, authorship, and representation across classrooms and communities.
Sessions in this strand might explore:
• Narrative authority and voice
• Girlhood studies and identity formation
• Literacy as resistance
• Commodification and agency
• Classroom applications centered on women emcees, producers, DJs, and cultural workers
Proposals should demonstrate how the study of women in hip hop strengthens students’ critical reading, writing, and interpretive skills while addressing equity and representation in curriculum design.
- Using a Hip-Hop Mindset in Leadership
What does hip-hop-informed leadership look like in schools?
This strand focuses on mindset, culture, and institutional practice. We invite school leaders to share models that reflect authenticity, creativity, accountability, and community engagement.
Sessions may address:
• Hip-hop principles applied to school culture
• Culturally sustaining leadership practices
• Programming that reflects student voice
• Building staff trust through authenticity
Proposals should offer concrete examples from traditional school settings and identify outcomes connected to student performance, teacher retention, or school climate.
If you are interested in presenting, please submit the following to info@lavoullegroup.com by April 15, 2026.
- Title of your session (maximum of 100 characters)
- Session description
- Include your presentation’s relevance to any educational context, a
maximum of 1,000 characters. - Include a brief bio that includes the name of the presenter(s), school affiliation, and accomplishments.
Read Write Rhyme Conference 