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<\/a>Outside the Glendale Branch<\/a> of the Salt Lake City Public Library<\/a>, break dancing erupted\u00a0when DJ Dynamic started busting out the beats. Onlookers ate pizza and enjoyed the dancing and music, while artist Zach Franzoni from Mestizo Institute of Culture and Arts<\/a> prepped canvases for a collaborative graffiti session. As the crowd swelled (ultimately to some 200 people), so did the excitement for what this May 11 ACME Session\u00a0hosted by the Utah Museum of Fine Arts<\/a>\u2014\u201cWhat\u2019s Hip Hop Got to Do with Education?\u201d\u2014had in store.<\/p>\n ACME<\/a> (Art. Community. Museum. Education.)\u00a0is the UMFA\u2019s outreach initiative dedicated to rethinking the public role of the museum. These bimonthly ACME Sessions bring together Salt Lake City\u2019s most creative, inventive, and cross-disciplinary minds\u2014K\u201312 educators, artists, museum professionals, university faculty and students, engineers, scientists, technologists, activists, researchers, and others. May\u2019s session was designed to demonstrate the value of hip-hop as a relevant educational vehicle.<\/p>\n Jarred Martinez and Saia Langi from Truth Cypher<\/a>, a Salt Lake-based community of writers, storytellers, and spoken word artists, started the session with a poem. They talked about the importance of school but also how hip-hop can help teachers connect with their students in more meaningful ways.<\/p>\n Jorge Rojas, UMFA director of education and engagement, gave a bilingual rundown of the ACME initiative. Paul Kuttner, the University Neighborhood Partners<\/a>\u2019 Education Pathways Partnership manager, explained that this session was designed to recognize hip-hop culture\u2019s approach to learning and how to\u00a0use it to transform traditional schooling methods to better serve our diverse youth.<\/p>\n Keynote speaker Robert Unzueta, a hip-hop and social justice professor at the University of Utah, then jumped in to explain that hip-hop is both an art medium that gives voice to marginalized communities and also a venue for knowledge production. He taught participants that marginalized communities use hip-hop as tool to engage in critical dialogue and action against social injustices.\u00a0After Unzueta read Tupac Shakur\u2019s \u201cThe Rose that Grew from Concrete,\u201d participants split into four breakout sessions to deepen the conversation:<\/p>\n These stations provided four different contexts in which to explore two specific questions: \u201cHow does learning, teaching, and social change happen through hip-hop?\u201d and \u201cHow can hip-hop culture help us rethink and transform schooling?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>Kuttner turned the audience\u2019s attention to a poster that\u00a0explained the original four \u201celements\u201d of hip-hop, each of which line up with a different kind of \u201cintelligence,\u201d as proposed by Harvard University professor Howard Gardener\u2019s theory of multiple intelligences.<\/p>\n\n