PHOTO /BLYTHE BAIRD
CHICAGO — Louder Than A Bomb (LTAB), the world’s biggest youth Poetry Slam festival, held in Chicago every year during February and March, is truly a revolution in education. Having just completed its fourteenth year, LTAB has made Chicago a leader in the global youth spoken word movement, which has a unique and critical role to play in social change.
This year, over 1,000 young people ages 12-19 from all over the Chicago area gathered to listen to each other deliver passionate poems about their day-to-day lives, struggles and dreams. Over 120 teams participated, including a third of all Chicago high schools!
What makes LTAB revolutionary? First of all, it is desegregating one of the most segregated cities in the nation. Also, from an educational perspective, it “turns the tables” of the traditional teacher-student paradigm: by placing the lived experiences, stories, and words of the youth at the center of the conversation, it empowers young people to name and tackle the problems they face daily. This places teachers in a position to offer guidance and challenges by listening and posing questions. These ideas, popularized by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, were already being practiced in LTAB before we had “Critical Pedagogy” theories to illuminate them. To quote Kevin Coval, LTAB co-founder: “Hip Hop was Freirean before we read Freire.” This kind of pedagogy cultivates critical thinking, dialogue, and leadership.
Important since its founding, LTAB means even more today, in the wake of the greatest attack on public education our city has ever seen: 50 public school closings. LTAB has risen as Chicago’s real public forum on the school closings – and real public education for our youth. The students of Maine West High School declared it in their group piece: “Our education is not a commodity.”
Responding to the community’s calls, Young Chicago Authors (the non-profit organization which runs LTAB) chose the theme “Freedom in Education” for this year’s festival. At “Crossing the Street,” the festival’s orientation, Coval asked students to consider where and how they get educated.
“At LTAB you get educated about things that are outside of your sphere of witnessing… you just get to learn and hear about things you’ve never thought about.” – Micah Hicks, age 16.
“I heard this amazing piece, it was called 26th street… which is an area I would never commute to – it’s so far from me. And I feel like LTAB brought 26th street to me. “– Baylee Champion, age 17.
This year I worked with students from the far west suburbs. Jenna Pitstick, age 18, remarked: “When you live in a community where everyone is white and Christian – not that that’s a bad thing – but when everyone has this… privileged life, you’re not gonna know to not judge people.” She and the rest of our West burbs crew are grateful for the opportunities LTAB offers to learn from others’ perspectives.
Baylee summed it up: “That’s why I love Louder Than A Bomb: because it can make you listen like nobody else can.”
