Lavie Raven is a social studies and language arts instructor at North Lawndale College Preparatory High School in Chicago, and is a co-founder and Prime-Minister of Education for the University of Hip-Hop, a multi-disciplinary school of the street arts. As a hip-hop artist, Raven was a leading member of Stony Island rap crew, and is an urban calligraphist/graffiti writer in the XMen, Burn Unit and TDT writing collectives. In his twenty years of teaching in Chicago’s public schools, and twenty-five years of community arts organizing, Raven has created strategies for integrating hip-hop into community service projects and classroom education. He has worked with youth on many community programs and social justice projects, with Habitat for Humanity, Pogranizce (Borderlands Project), Alternatives community center, the Southwest Youth Collaborative, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Park District, the University of Chicago, and numerous Chicago Public Schools, among many others. Raven also completed community mural projects in Sejny, Poland; Liberia, Costa Rica; Oakland, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; Alert Bay, British Columbia; Kauai, Hawai’I, and Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Lavie is also an adjunct professor in Art Education and Arts Administration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and DePaul University. He is presently completing his doctorate in interdisciplinary studies at Teacher’s College at Columbia University.