Christopher Emdin

It was 2013, in New York.

To explain natural selection, a teacher talked about a playlist.

The teacher's name was Christopher Emdin.

He had grown up in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

He had studied biology, chemistry and anthropology at Lehman College, then natural sciences. In 2007, he earned a doctorate in urban education and joined Teachers College at Columbia University.

He was a scientist. He was also a rapper.

As a teacher, he was given a piece of advice: erase his Blackness. Make parts of himself invisible.

He did the opposite. He became a better teacher by drawing more deeply on hip-hop culture.

He took as his model the cypher, the circle where people improvise. In a cypher, you guide without controlling.

That was how he wanted his classes to be.

In 2013, he launched a project with the rapper GZA, of the Wu-Tang Clan, and the website Rap Genius. It was called Science Genius.

Ten public high schools in New York took part. Most of their students were Black or Latino. They had to write raps about physics, biology or chemistry.

At the launch, at Teachers College, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson introduced the two men.

GZA knew what he was talking about. He had left school in tenth grade. Later, he had fallen in love with science.

Every week, Columbia students came into the classrooms to help the teenagers write. The raps were graded with detailed rubrics.

"This is not just kids rhyming," Emdin said.

One student, Keegan Dillion, had lost his love of science. With the project, he began studying science words at home.

At the end, GZA judged the best raps. The winners had their songs recorded and posted online. They spent a day with him.

That year, Emdin had written:

In 2016, he published a book addressed to teachers: For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too. It became a New York Times bestseller. He also founded the #HipHopEd movement. In 2021 came another book, Ratchetdemic.

He spent nearly two years at the University of Southern California. Then he came back to Teachers College.

In October 2023, Teachers College gave him the Maxine Greene Chair. Maxine Greene, a philosopher of education, had guided him early on. She had written the foreword to his first book.

"A full circle event," he said.

Christopher Emdin did not grow up in the Ubuntu tradition. But his way of teaching echoes it: a student becomes himself when the circle makes room for him.

A playlist to explain natural selection: that was his way of opening the circle.