Using Hip Hop To Teach Science

Imagine being in a science class and getting bombarded with complicated terms and phrases. It can be daunting for people of color who are underrepresented in the sciences.

But there’s a push in academia to change that --- through hip hop. That’s the approach taken by Biologist Danielle Lee, a self-defined hip hop maven. She’s a post-doctoral research associate at Cornell University, where she studies animal behavior and behavioral ecology. She regularly uses hip hop in the classroom and plans to do so in her new position at Cornell.

Recently, she visited Champaign-Urbana to help one of the graduate students in her lab collect prairie voles. Illinois Public Media’s Sean Powers met up with her.

Danielle Lee's blog, The Urban Scientist