Magdalena Gross-Test Tracks Developer and Mural Artist

Magdalena Gross is a Teach For America Corps Member in the Chicago region and the Minister of Collaboration for UHipHop. She teaches 8th grade Reading, Language Arts, and Social Studies in a public school on Chicago’s South Side. Magda graduated with honors from the University of Chicago in 2004 and is currently finishing her Master’s Degree in Teaching from Dominican University. She also runs an after-school UHipHop mural arts program at American Quality Schools’ Prairie Campus. Magda has taken a special interest in using hip-hop to help her students engage social justice and the public arts, and her students produce dozens of seminally conscious research projects every school year. Through the UHipHop based “Crosstrain” program of the summers of 2003 and 2004, Magda helped to link youth from Oakland, California, Chicago, and the South Bronx, New York for the purposes of creating public arts projects through multi-media resources. Magda has worked with youth on many community hip-hop arts programs and social justice projects, for international groups such as Poland’s Pogranicze organization (Borderlands Project), nationally for the Lakota community in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and for Chicago groups such as the Southwest Youth Collaborative, the Chicago Park District, the University of Chicago, the Chicago Public Schools, and numerous other organizations. Magda is presently collaborating with Andrew Unger on the Test Track project, a rap music initiative for improving youth’s test-performance and academic achievement through literacy growth and musical engagement of historical knowledge in social studies. In the future she hopes to expand her use of hip-hop education with her students and to spearhead unconventional youth empowerment projects in and out of the classroom.