Education is both an ideological and political enterprise where dominant expressions of racial, gendered, classed, and generational forms are borne out in the classroom on a daily basis in avariety of ways. These ways of thinking, knowing, and being have become not just commonplace, but normal. Anything existing outside these so-called normal standards and practices is marginalized, ostracized, and in some cases criminalized in the public school classroom leaving many of our students under-represented and under-served. Therefore critical and democratic educators must seek to disrupt these notions of “common sense” that serve to reproduce oppressive societal norms in education. To this end critically minded educators must ask several questions: 1. How are relationships between curriculum and culture created and maintained? 2. Who is “invisible” in our schools and classrooms? Why are they so? 3. What counts as intellectual work and who says that this is so? 4. How do educators begin to make arguments that contradict “common sense”? 5. What and where are the possibilities for the formation of strategic alliances? 6. What are the implications, intended and otherwise? I wish to examine each of these questions so that students and educators can begin to buildcounter-narratives around how public education in the United States “should work” and what can be done to “fix it.” In particular, I wish to look at the ways that hip-hop culture can be employed as meaningful strategy for educators and students to explore their collective vision of what it means to be human. How does the intersection of education and hip-hop culture allow students to create a shared understanding of identity, agency for themselves, and change in their communities.