City Lore (Project: From Harikatha to Hip Hop)

New York, New York, 10003

Last updated on April 28, 2025

Grant awarded by

Library of Congress

Region

East

Organization Type

Cultural Institution

Congressional District(s)

3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

Fiscal Year Of First Grant

FY 2022 [10/01/21 - 09/30/22]

Contributing Organization(s)

Organization description

Founded in 1985, City Lore’s mission is to foster New York City – and America’s – living cultural heritage through education and public programs in service of cultural equity and social justice. City Lore encompasses a Lower East Side gallery space, performances, lectures, the People’s Hall of Fame, a POEMobile that projects poems onto walls and buildings, and programs throughout the five boroughs.

We document, present, and advocate for New York City’s grassroots cultures to ensure their living legacy in stories and histories, places and traditions. We work in four cultural domains: urban folklore and history; preservation; arts education; and grassroots poetry traditions. In each, we seek to further cultural equity and model a better world with projects as dynamic and diverse as New York City itself.

Project description

“From Harikatha to Hip Hop: Integrating Library of Congress Primary Sources on Traditional Music and Dance into the Humanities Curriculum” is a professional learning and curriculum design program that supports middle and high school educators to integrate folk and traditional music, dance, and oral traditions from around the world into their teaching of the humanities, history, and civics.

Arts are rich storytellers in and of themselves: they record and express history, convey important social and cultural meanings, and help to illuminate a people or society, its beliefs, its politics, and more. They are powerful vehicles for teaching humanities subjects, including history, language arts, civics, and more. The Harikatha to Hip Hop program brings together a cohort of secondary teachers from several New York City public schools and City Lore teaching artists working in culturally-rooted music, dance, and oral traditions to participate in a series of professional learning workshops on teaching with primary sources, as well as in-school arts residencies. Artists and teachers are paired to collaboratively design and teach lesson plans integrating primary sources from the rich digital collections of the Library of Congress. The teaching artists also share their artistry in the classroom through live performance, art-making, interviews, and other modalities as a way of making meaningful and embodied connections to the primary sources.

Ultimately, each pair produces four original lessons combining LOC sources and art/art-making. The lesson plans will be published and shared widely as a dedicated website of curricula, instructional videos, and other resources for educators anywhere to access and utilize in their own classrooms.

TPS project focus

Curriculum
Teaching Materials
Workshops

Content focus

Art
Civics
Civil Rights
Civil War
Cultural Studies
Economics
English Language Arts
Equity and Inclusion
Gender Studies
Geography
History
Information Literacy
Journalism
Library/Media Studies
Literacy
Music
Religion
Research
Technology
World War II

Audience

Artists
Classroom teachers
Curriculum coordinators
Homeschoolers
Librarians/Media specialists
Musicians
Students
Teacher candidates/Student teachers

Level(s)

6 - 8
9 - 12

Population focus

African Americans
Asian Americans
English language learners
Hispanic/Latinx
Jewish Americans
Learners with disabilities
LGBTQIA+
Low income
Men and boys
Muslim Americans
Native American/Indigenous
Rural
Urban
Women and girls