Professor Remixes English Composition into Therapeutic Writing Cyphers

DECATUR, Ga.—JL Adolph, Ph.D., stood on the Georgia State University TEDx stage looking less like a professor and more as a hip-hop artist of the 80s.

Dressed in all black—which included a tee, lightweight jacket, jeans and tennis shoes—Adolph started his presentation citing lyrics from Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s iconic anthem called “The Message.”

Next, he offered this attention-getting line: “I am a bastard!” With these four words reverberating through the auditorium, Adolph, standing at 6’0, settled in for a 15-minute narrative on how he pushed beyond the stigma of being born in St. Louis to unwed teen parents and growing up in what he says was a dysfunctional home that included verbal putdowns, drug abuse and low expectations. It’s also the entry point for Adolph to talk about how he overcame Adverse Childhood Experiences, or what’s commonly referred to in psychological circles as ACEs—and how hip-hop and writing helped him to heal inner wounds.

“When you are a child like myself, an ACEs survivor, who has dealt with adverse childhood experiences, you have family, you have community, you had the media and everyone writing your script for you,” he said.

“But it's something powerful when you start learning that you can take the pen and start writing your own script.”

At Georgia State University’s Perimeter College, Adolph now brings his passion for hip-hop, healing and helping students become better writers to the English support course that he teaches four times weekly. The class is called “ENGL 1101/9999: Using Hip-Hop to Overcome ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) to Boost (Emotional Intelligence) EQ and Career Readiness” and it enables Adolph to promote hip-hop as a transformative tool which can be used as a unique approach to boost writing skills, emotional intelligence, and college-to-career skills.

“What I want to teach my class is not only how to write, but why we write,” he said.

In Professor Adolph’s class, students are introduced to the concept of writing a zine, a mini-magazine of sorts, where they compose narrative-styled essays and poems about instances where they overcame adverse situations that led to trauma, low self-esteem, anxiety, imposter syndrome or some other form of emotional distress.

As part of the project, students are expected to conduct research on ways that other individuals dealt with similar situations and then incorporate this along with a hip-hop playlist and other elements into their essays. As a framework for writing, Adolph uses a method he created called EDR, with E referring to the word externalization. In this phase, he encourages students to reflect on what happened to them and to put distance between themselves and the episode in order to write from a strengths-based approach. The D stands for deconstruction, and what Adolph considers a necessary step for the re-telling of one’s story. And the R represents reflection or the rewriting of a negative situation. Students are guided to write their stories as manifestos using either prose, poetry, or through the construct of a hip-hop song.

Elijah Bryant, an English pathway student, recalls the day he unexpectedly ‘broke down’ in class during an emotional discussion.

“It’s been a one-of-a-kind class for me,” Bryant said. “It makes things feel more meaningful.”

Vera Green agrees and says the writing prompts that Professor Adolph uses have helped her deal with pain, anger and anxiety, while also helping her become a better writer.

“Not everyone has ACEs, but most of us do and we don’t recognize it,” she said. “Writing about them helps me address it and get through it.”

For Adolph, the most important thing is for students to write freely.

“I demonstrate how hip-hop therapeutic writing bridges art and psychology—remixing not only how we tell our stories, but how we understand ourselves,” Adolph said.

“I call it a first aid therapeutic kit, because they now have this script that they wrote about how they overcame.

“With a physical first aid kit, you have your bandages and your Neosporin and that sort of thing. But what does it look like for a mental health hip-hop therapeutic first aid kit? You would have song lyrics, you would have images, you would have stories. And so, they actually produce this zine.”

An award-winning professor, Adolph received his doctoral degree in English and African Diaspora Studies from University of Missouri-Columbia (Mizzou). His scholarly and entrepreneurial work includes the exploration of fatherhood narratives in hip-hop lyricism, as well as working with educators, social workers and fatherhood practitioners (Fathers Matter ATL) to explore hip-hop therapy as a way to help fathers heal.

Adolph says that his overarching goal is to bridge his love for both hip-hop and academia so that students have the necessary strategies for navigating life.

“I want to help students work on reading comprehension skills as well as narrative essay writing.

“It's all through using hip-hop music and culture as a sort of instrument to help them boost their emotional intelligence as well as their career readiness.”

Story by Kysa Anderson Daniels

Photo by Bill Roa