In the right-hand side of his classroom, teacher Jhon J. Ulloa saw an empty seat. Dilan, a 12-year-old student with difficulties in reading and writing, was no longer at the Humberto Jordán Mazuera school in the Villa Blanca campus, located in commune 13 in the eastern part of Cali, Colombia. 

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Teacher Jhon J, as he is known at school, went to talk to the campus coordinator. Calling the student's grandmother he learned the news, “Dilan is not coming back. His father took him to Tumaco, a rural municipality on the coast of the Colombian Pacific, because he no longer obeys, his mother has died, and the streets are too dangerous”.

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In Cali, school dropouts in primary education increased from 3.9% in 2019 to 5.6% in 2022, according to a study conducted by “Cali, How Are We Doing?”, a program that monitors the quality of life in the city.

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Dilan was part of the Flexible Learning Acceleration Educational Model through the Colombian Ministry of Education. This special education classroom focuses on promoting the inclusion of children and adolescents between 10 and 15 years old in vulnerable conditions and older than their peers, when they do not have the competencies necessary to allow them to pass from 4th to 5th grade in elementary school.

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Situations like these occur with some regularity in the most vulnerable areas of Cali, as these are common locations where migrants from the Pacific region arrive, victims of forced displacement and armed conflict. In these sectors, poverty conditions are increasing due to difficulty in finding formal employment, urban violence due to the distribution of narcotics by criminal enterprises, family conflict, and a lack of quality in the schools, among other social pressures.

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It is in this context that the Hip Hop Peña Foundation, a community organization that utilizes rap to achieve social change within the youth population, began to develop the second phase of the “Narrating and Rapping Life” project, as a pedagogical strategy to improve reading and writing in school with the cooperation with the LEO Fund.

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Last month, in June of 2024, the second phase of the project was launched and seeks to improve the reading and writing ability of 60 children and teenagers in two classrooms of Flexible Educational Methodologies. The first, Horizons with a Compass, aims to help children and adolescents between the ages of 9 to 15, who have not learned how to read and write and to help them catch up from first to third grade. The second, Acceleration of Learning, aims to help children and adolescents who are older than their peers successfully complete their elementary school requirements and advance to secondary education.

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According to Leidy Cabezas, legal representative of Hip Hop Peña, the pedagogical strategy of “Narrating and Rapping Life Phase II” is innovative because reading and writing processes are accompanied by musical composition and the creation of radio pieces. It became evident in the project’s first phase that the reading and writing skills of children and young people can improve, moving them on to the next level of education.

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The second phase of the “Narrating and Rapping Life” project seeks to impact the educational community, by including two new components, psychosocial and research, which considers that children at the Humberto Jordán Mazuera school in Villa Blanca, are not only influenced by the school's learning methods but also with other circumstances, said Leidy Cabezas. 

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From a research perspective, we will work with the two teachers in the Flexible Methodologies Classrooms to better understand what variables contribute to children being behind educationally. Psychosocially, a family assessment will be carried out in 5 cases where complex situations exist that impact the child’s learning.