The Big Idea
To inspire archival preservation, promote equity, and design educational approaches that encourage humanities-centered computational media-making that borrows from culture, art, music, and other attractive media practices. The projects we produce are aligned with national and state educational standards. and apply cultural methodologies, digital tools, and new media technologies to enhance the civic engagement, coding, and creative capacities of secondary and post-secondary youth and youth influencers.
Our Story
Four Four Beat Labs is a STEAM-inspired maker space founded in 2012 to expand its project portfolio from the design of curriculum projects to include the preservation of media artifacts inspired by culture, music, and the Hip Hop Archive. Our projects are critical, creative, and collaborative. They seek to prompt action and shape influencers with an awareness and responsibility to produce media artifacts that address local, national, and global challenges of community sustainability.
The Four Four flagship is the HipHop2020 Innovation Archive, which started in 2007 as a one-day student conference called the HipHop2020 Curriculum Project. Its aim has remained on pushing the envelope of archival innovation when considering Hip Hop-inspired pedagogics as a 21st-century ‘technology of education’ in STEAM, computational media, and humanities instruction.
To stay up-to-date on the HipHop2020 Innovation Archive, follow us @hiphophighered. Our hashtag is #HipHopHigherEd. Subscribe below to receive our newsletters and access to subscription-only content.
Don’t worry! We won’t share your information or spam your inbox.
Our Partners
We value our team, partnerships, collaborators, and supporters. Hit the call-to-action button below to let us know how we can partner with you on your next great project.