Pierre-Valery Njenji Tchetgen is a PhD Candidate in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. A poet and musician, he is also the founder of Music Is Healing and WordSoundLife.org, a social network for digital media learning and the home of Voices of the New Millennium. His work in Education/Information focuses on communication technologies and designing culturally-grounded embodied learning environments leveraging voice, rhythm and movement practices from trans-African settings. As a past recipient of the SHASS predoctoral fellowship (2017-18), Pierre-Valery is an Affiliate Researcher in Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT who collaborated with Professors Nick Montfort and Fox Harrell. His residency focused on the linguistic and communicative applications of drum languages to create rhythmic software systems for human interaction. His dissertation study focuses on the literacy and social-emotional development of Black youth through digital drum talk. The significance of this research arises from the potential to inform how multimodal technologies, which are grounded in the historical and cultural context of under-represented students, can be used to help open new pathways to literacy for all children, PreK-2nd grade. His book of poetry, Dirges of Becoming, was accepted as a Creative Thesis for the Masters of Arts Program in Humanities (MAPH) at the University of Chicago (2003), and has since then been performed at conferences, concerts, poetry venues and festivals nationwide. He is the recipient of the Bedell Scholarship from the Aspen Writers Foundation (2007), the host of Music Is Healing radio on WMBR (Cambridge), and the ambassador of the Unity through Music festival.
