On Tuesday, November 17th as part of the Different Lenses, One Vision (dLOV) conference, Clint Smith, internationally recognized, award winning poet and educator, spoke and performed poetry on the danger of silence in the face of others’ suffering and youth empowerment through writing in the classroom. Both in his poems and intermittent explications, he tackled topics ranging from his strong family ties, to the structural challenges his students were made to bear both within and beyond their Prince George’s County school building, to decoupling the idea of being well-schooled versus the idea of being well-educated as he learned from his creative writing courses with incarcerated men, to the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement in bringing to the fore of public conversation the structural violence that has permeated American society and disenfranchised people of color since being explicitly written into this nation’s founding documents. He discussed how in his role as an educator, every day in the classroom is an opportunity to work with students to understand that this world was built and can be rebuilt, to understand that this reality was constructed and can be reconstructed. He asked, what is education if not a space to be liberated from the status quo? And what is teaching if not the opportunity for us to reimagine the world? He left audience members with the unifying question: “how do we practice a radical empathy where we recognize there is a world that exists beyond our own body?”
An alumnus of the New Orleans Public School System, Clint Smith earned a BA in English from Davidson College and is a current doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Education. He is also the recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship with research interests that include critical pedagogy, mass incarceration, race, and inequality.
For more information on his work or to view his TedTalks and other spoken word performances, visit his website at http://www.clintsmithiii.com/.
-Catherine Duarte, SM ’16 and Christine Mitchell, SD ’19
