Poetically Remixing Classic Literature: Tasha Jones at TEDxIndianapolis

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TEDx

Tasha Jones TEDx Talk consumed the audience when she explained the process of DJaying and married the concept to classroom instruction. "DJ's mix existing music, with new concepts or ideas to create or form a new sound. Introducing scholars to CLASSIC LITERATURE with a new methodology, i.e., summarize the text as a reality TV show and ask scholars to visualize a news anchors lead-in to the summary." She explained how that technique or those similar sucked her scholars into Shakespeare without diminishing the literature itself which proved valuable in the classroom. The audience essentially became her scholars, and Jones taught, "adding the relevancy and creativity to the launch(ing) of text helps develop meta-cognitive thinking." She drove the point, "extrapolating the old while creating the new is a technique underserved children have known and utilized their entire lives and should be deepened in the classroom and not alleviated." Maybe all classroom educators can learn from HIP-HOP and even more so from Jones of how to marry existing concepts with new ideas.

- BNCLIP.COM

#METOO

"Jones' work in public space works to provide an alternative cultural self-object, image, and message to survivors. By speaking the truth of sexual violation and encouraging women to write, write, "speak your truths"...she offers herself as a cultural self-object with whom survivors can experience themselves as acknowledged, honored and emphatically cared about. In this way, Jones' work engages the sociological, and psychological dimensions of women's healing needs. Her willingness to speak, write, see, show, and hear incarnates God's concern for the wounded to be holistically healed through communal interactions...allows women to receive unobstructed views of images and messages that holistically empower them in the fullness of their embodiment, and find courage to use their own voice to become agents in their own sacred healing. Jones picks up where Ntozake Shange left off when she wrote For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is not Enuf."

- Dr. Stephanie Crumpton

... IT LIVES FOR US

"Dementia" is a riveting piece that interrogates the political utility of cultural memory within hip-hop. I AM Tasha Jones blurs the lines between the public and private, the personal and political to offer a searing critique of what happens when hip-hop forgets where "home" is." Dementia a poem written and performed by Poet, I AM Tasha Jones, inculcates the theory that Hip Hop has forgotten who it is and its purpose for being present, regardless of sexual preference. She contends the root is severed. Hip-Hop now suffers from a lack of respect for itself and women in general. Listen as this homage marks a generation longing for a 'return to self' and balance in the genre that fed, nourished, and raised a nation of millions.

- Demetrius Noble, activist, renowned poet, a recent graduate from North Carolina A&T State University and A Wadaran L. Kennedy Scholar (4.0)

IDENTITY

"For all who believe we're living in a post-racial society, Tasha Jones' “Pyramids to Plantations to Projects to Penitentiaries” offers a bracing corrective. African-Americans descended from the great builders of the pyramids came largely to this country as slaves to work the plantations of our nation's founders. Ms. Jones reminds us that despite the noble rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, the freedom promised in those documents was not available to all, and a system of racial oppression has been in place ever since—through Jim Crow, racial covenants, and housing discrimination, profiling and police violence, and the entire prison industrial complex. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has observed, "Until we accept our collective biography and its consequences,​ we cannot be fully free. Tasha's poem challenges us to live in the truth."

- Karen Kovacik, Professor of English at IUPUI, former Poet Laureate of Indiana

VIVID & VALID

I first heard Tasha Jones' poem “From Pyramids to Plantations to Projects to Penitentiaries” when she performed it at a “Resist” Poetry Reading after the recent election. Twenty-five people read poems, but I don't remember a single one of the others. I could not forget Tasha's. Follow Tasha Jones' poem to a deeper understanding of injustice and endurance, of suffering and survival.

- Dan Wakefield

HELLO BEAUTIFUL

I enjoyed yesterday's story very much. It inspired me to tell you about an incredible woman in Indianapolis. Her name is Tasha Jones. She is a poet, artist, educator, and founder of the Hello Beautiful movement. Hello Beautiful started in Ms. Jones' public school classroom where she was the 14th teacher the class had in ONE school year. All of their other teachers gave up on them, but not Tasha Jones. This simple act of language changed the dynamic of the entire classroom, and EVERY student passed to the next grade.

- Kitchen Sisters, NPR