About Ed Emcees
During his Ph.D studies, Tony Keith, Jr. could not find any published theories about educators who are also professional poets, spoken word artists, rappers, and mc’s.
Dr. Keith believes that [our] roles in solving problems with racial equity in education are critical, but our voices in academia are unheard because Hip-Hop is often misunderstood.
So, he developed a theory of Hip-Hop Educational Leadership (HHEL) for his dissertation by interviewing ten people who fit this description.
2019 Squad
(ltr): Jessica Valoris; Jessica Care Moore; William E. Jenkins; Tony Keith, Jr.; Yusha Assad; Veracity Savant; Branden Balenzuela; Elisabet Velasquez. Not pictured: Melissa Princess Best; JP Reynolds and Justis Lopez.
Note: Pseudonyms were used for the research.
Blackout Poetic Transcription (BPT)
Dr. Keith developed a method called Blackout Poetic Transcription (BPT) for transcribing their interviews into small chunks of poetically formatted qualitative data, which are called “data poems”.
Then, he searched through hundreds of data poems to discover the language to finally answer his research questions and to identify common themes from their told stories.
Source: Keith and Endsley (2020).
Next, Dr. Keith reviewed the BPT method with Lul Marley - a young adult rapper from Washington DC, who gave it his “stamp” of approval.